Week 3- Thing 7

iTunes' New Challenge Comes from Amazon
By Daniel Drew Turner September 27, 2007 No DRM restraints and slightly cheaper music stand to make Amazon's MP3 Store the first serious competitor to iTunes

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Amazon.com this week launched its new Amazon MP3 Store, which, some analysts say, may become the first serious digital music challenger to Apple's dominant iTunes Music Store.
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Like the iTMS, Amazon's online store offers digital music tracks and albums from major-label artists. However, all tracks offered by Amazon are free of DRM (Digital Rights Management) constraints, unlike the majority on iTMS. All $0.99 tracks on iTMS are encoded with Apple's FairPlay, which restricts the number of computers on which the music can be copied. Though some iTunes Plus downloads on iTMS are DRM-free and encoded at a 256K bps rate, these are priced at $1.29, whereas all tracks on Amazon's store are also 256K bps and come at a lower cost: $0.89 or $0.99.