It has been reported that Amazon MP3 may be upgrading their systems, user interface and more in Q1 2011. Currently Amazon accounts for 7.1% of the entire US music market and their download service accounts for 1.3% of the same market. Amazon is looking to turn things around and really compete with iTunes head on.
Amazon is aiming for a major Q1 relaunch of the MP3 Store’s APIs and web services. They’re asking partners that are building out or planning to launch Amazon MP3 integrations to hold off until this new release is baked.
Another piece of evidence: Amazon is actively hiring for the MP3 Store team. The MP3 Store’s Twitter account
has just tweeted a page with over a dozen job openings for both business and engineering positions, including spots for a Web Applications Manager, Client Application Developer, and engineers dedicated to mobile apps for both Android and other partners (some of these openings were listed in the last five months, while others are apparently brand new).
Disclosure: RouteNote is partnered with Amazon.
In order to encourage people to get their music online with us, and introduce new potential customers to our service, we thought we’d run a little competition. If you’re a solo musician or you’re in a band that has new music that needs to get out there and selling, all you need to do is add a comment to this blog post with the name of the band or artist and a link to the track that you think is their (or your) best. We’ll keep entries open until the 14th of December, and then we’ll judge all the tracks that have been entered. The top 3 according to our judges will be given completely free distribution to all of our partners stores during 2010 on any new releases they upload to RouteNote. No fees, no subscriptions, no back end cut, no strings – just access to our service completely free until 2011. The top 5 will get a feature and review on our blog, and we’re promoting this competition in collaboration with www.music-news.com, so you can expect to get their attention too. This competition is open only to artists and bands and music not already signed up to RouteNote.
Thanks, and good luck!
Here at RouteNote we have been trying to improve our service so that artists from all over the world now have access to selling their music online via the worlds largest download stores. Previously we talked about how with RouteNote artists can get their music onto iTunes, but I just wanted to let everyone know that we also distribute to eMusic and Amazon Mp3.
I know that iTunes has over 80% of the digital music download market at the moment, but very slowly eMusic and Amazon Mp3 are closing the gap. eMusic is known for having the worlds largest independent catalogue, while Amazon Mp3 are the new players on the block who are making great strides in a short period of time.
So if you want to get your music onto eMusic and Amazon Mp3 for free then head over to our registration page and signup.
RouteNote partner Amazon has launched their ever popular music store Amazon Mp3 in the UK. Amazon Mp3 contains over 5 million DRM free tracks. On an individual track basis, the store has variable pricing, with songs starting at 59p, but other categories for tracks costing 60p-69p, 70p-79p, and over 80p. Albums are more variable, although £6.49 appears to be one popular price point for new albums. However, I have noticed at the moment they are pushing out major track downloads for only £0.29.
Amazon Mp3 for the UK was launched on Wednesday of last week without any press although British-based music blog MusicAlly was the first to spot it.
The increased competition brought about by a heavyweight like Amazon stepping into the ring may already have had an effect on music pricing in the United Kingdom. MusicAlly reports that as Amazon MP3 launched there, Apple dropped its prices on key albums in the British version of iTunes, including those by Oasis and Fleet Foxes, to under $6.
Over at MusicAlly they have pointed out that the new U2 album (No Line On The Horizon) is currently on Amazon’s US Mp3 store for only $3.99. However, because we are based in the UK there is nowhere we can get this album for so cheap, until now. Tesco has taken the step forward and is now selling the new U2 album in a week-long deal for ony £3.97.
This shows that the digital music store price wars are about to heat up! However, you will notice that iTunes never seems to get into these price wars.
Amazon has been trading in mp3 downloads for a year now, and while it’s still nothing like a serious competitor to itunes, it’s made a healthy start in the market. Amazon is the biggest e-commerce organisation in the world, so they did start with a captive audience, albeit not as well targeted at music consumers as Apple’s list of ipod owners. From a standing start they’ve sold 130 million tracks in their first year. The vast bulk of these being in the USA, the only country where they were operational until their UK store opened earlier this month. As impressive as this volume of sales is, it pales in comparison to the 2.4 billion tracks that itunes is predicted to sell by the end of the year, eighteen times what Amazon have sold.
iTunes and the iPod/iPhone deliver a package that’s hard to beat; ease of use with a really good looking piece of technology,
ad it’s hard to see how Amazon can break people out of that neat circle of consumption. Their fledgling relationship with Google might prove an ace in the hole; they’re working together to provide MP3 downloads on the G1 – Google’s iPhone competitor. This will probably end up being another iteration of the age old mac vs. pc battle, greater stability and efficiency coupled with higher prices on the mac side, with more flexibility, content and bugs on the pc/Google side, although the search giant is a new factor in this battle, having so neatly taken effective control of the search and contextual advertising sectors of the net, and stripping Microsoft’s flagship Office software out from under it’s nose with their Google documents suite.
However this pans out, Amazon and iTunes will still own between 75% and 85% of the digital music market between them, with the rest of it divided up between a turbulent and ever changing multitude of other minor players. This market is only going to get bigger, especially now the lines between phones, mp3 players, web tablets and personal computers are blurring so fast. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Amazon’s next generation of their Kindle reader have a phone, web browser and mp3 player built into it using Google’s Android/Chrome platforms.
