Unless it’s being selectively rolled out, it looks like MP3 links are included on CD pages. For instance, the page for TV On The Radio’s Young Liars EP (CD) has at least two links to buy the album in MP3, along with one link per track.

Very cool. In my spot check I hadn’t seen it anyplace.

From a data standpoint, I’ll bet that takes some pretty heavy lifting to get in place.

Yeah, this is extremely good news to us users, Apple now has got to step up to keep us as costumers… Too bad it’s still just to U.S. costumers. How will it be in countries that don’t have an Amazon store? How will this system work in Europe? Questions, questions…

The Amazon mp3-store is US only.

When are the record companies going to realize that the rest of the world wants their products too? Why not just make everything global?

The math is easy:

US: 300 millions

World: 6 200 millions.

Want to make money? I guess not…

I thought the big deal was piracy. If the labels are through with the idea of DRM, why not be through with it everywhere?

It makes no sense to sell DRM free at Amazon and DRMed at iTunes.

DRM is over; AAC is better; Apple wins with iPod sales and a good competitor so they are not considered a “monopoly.”

…apart from the obvious competition introduced by this via the Amazon (no, not the jungle), what else will it take to bring the DRM-free tracks on iTunes down in price?

I’ll probably explore buying some of these from amazon.

I buy most of my cd’s from them already as lately I can’t seem to get my itunes account to work for anything I try to buy for last two weeks.

its bothersome that many of the songs I bought from itunes store i paid 99¢ for in the past now cost $1.29 each for the non-DRM versions.

normally I’d say its a sign of the times, inflation… but what’s the difference?

several years ago… mp3 from itunes, 99¢ (before drm)

now… drm free mp3 from itunes, $1.29.

i just don’t get the cost increase at all. are these songs better? now more enhanced with vitamins? new drm free songs come with free emoticons? c’mon apple tell me what I get for an extra 30¢?

…disabling any file with the .mp3 extension.

I see a nice array of artists, and an interesting variety of song titles and prices. I’m a Jethro Tull fan myself, and it’s nice to see a pretty broad array of options available in the Amazon MP3 store for them.

Some (even more) less typical artists like October Project are there as well. However, I do see that in order to buy an entire album I have to use the “Amazon MP3 Downloader”.

Makes me wonder what’s involved in that little bit of software. I can download the MP3’s without using it, but that will cost me a premium over the “album” price.

I think it’s cool that Amazon is offering this, and they indicate that the downloader will also automatically import songs into iTunes. Just leaves me wondering what else the downloader might be tracking… But maybe I’m just being too paranoid.

Amazon confirmed Tuesday that some of its music downloads contain digital watermarks [which] allows companies to silently brand music files with identifying information, such as customer- and vendor-identification numbers, digitally woven into the fabric of the song. Those hidden patterns allow music companies to track the origins of music that show up on peer-to-peer sharing sites… watermarks can raise privacy and liability concerns, because a person could be charged for copyright violations if the music appears on file-sharing networks, even if the consumer did not put it there,” Kravets reports. “Of the two major labels participating in Amazon’s music-download service, Universal Music Group uses watermarks, and EMI — for now — doesn’t.”

That is of course once I finish using all of my Secondspin credits.

I am really happy about this. Even though alot of the same tracks are availiable non-DRM in iTunes, I still prefer MP3 files and these are 256 VBR.

According to this blog post from Matthew Ingram in the Globe and Mail.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070925.WBmingram20070925133033/WBStory/WBmingram/?page=rss&id=RTGAM.20070925.WBmingram20070925133033

Did you know that? You can download these MP3s from another country. Just did it from my home town in France with a amazon.fr account AND inputting a US zip code with the matching State.

Easy isn’t it? I hope they won’t block this.

Won’t Apple find this just its cup of tea? To use the clique-ed example, what if Gillette found it could sell even more, very profitable razors and not have to sell the blades that make no profit?

And could the timing be better? Apple builds the market, accrues the cash to take on the cellphone biz, and—just in the week when the music moguls are getting around to demanding a share of its iPod revenue—the whole music market goes DRM-free, which means the music industry has just lost any claims that it might have on iPod profts. No?

I bought one track from Amazon when it went on-line. Neither iTunes nor Windows Media Player (both on XP) will play it properly.

At mostly regular intervals, the sound cuts out. Out of over 45 gig of music, only this track is having this problem. They have let me download it twice, but no dice.

Could it be their watermarking system? Anyone else having any problems?

http://techadox.com

Interesting that as of Thursday evening the top song was 1234 by Feist, a song popularized by its use in an Apple iPod Nano commercial. Apple’s iTunes model made purchased downloadable music a functioning commercial model. I wonder whose pocket that 10 cents a track is coming out of?