Courtesy of Hypebot’s New Music Business Briefing this week: The mainstream music industry press (in the form of Billboard) talks about the possibility of Amazon entering the digital music market. Some quick points, for those keeping score at home:

  • Hypebot brags that they’ve been out in front on the Amazon story for some time now. Fair play to them, they’ve done a good job of keeping up to date with Amazon-related developments.
  • Billboard revisits the complaints of the major labels that Amazon wasn’t willing to take on Apple with a DRM-based offering. Sorry, folks, I pointed out over a year ago [what a stupid idea that was][what a]"), especially given that Amazon is in business to serve its customers, not the business models of the major labels.
  • As [I predicted][I predi], Amazon has at least been trying to establish price points for a la carte downloads below the prevailing $0.99 per track model (which in turn is based on a wholesale price to labels of $0.70 per track). However Amazon is encountering resistance, and it’s not clear if it will be successful, at least initially.

Interesting times. But enough Amazon for now; this is an eMusic blog, so I’ll try to post on eMusic next.

[what a]: http://internet.seekingalpha.com/article/7141 “Frank Hecker on Challenges to Apple’s Digital Music Business (AAPL, AMZN [I predi]: http://swindleeeee.com/2007/04/07/amazon-predictions-part-2-selling-digital-music-and-cds-together/