Amazon today has expanded their popular Amazon MP3 store to the UK, marking the first time the store had been available outside the US.
The store will be almost identical to its American counterpart and will sell DRM-free MP3 tracks and albums that can be played in any media player.
The launch of the site is missing many artists’ catalogs but Amazon says they will be adding music regularly.
Another interesting note is the pricing. Apple’s iTunes charges a fixed price of £0.79 per song but Amazon will charge between £0.59p and £0.80p “depending on the currency and popularity of the content.”
Full albums are steeply discounted and can sell for as low as £3 for major groups.
The large e-tailer expects to expand the store into other countries in the next year including Canada, France and Japan.
Result for: adding music
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has suffered another legal setback after a judge denied a ruling in a music piracy case this week. The judge ruled that “the sole act of making a music file available in a “shared folder” does not violate copyright laws.”
In the case Atlantic v. Howell, the RIAA asserted that a “sound recording” that is legally ripped to a PC and then stored in any type of shared folder is unauthorized and illegal. The assertion was not really clear however, as a shared folder is a very broad category.
The RIAA saw some backlash for its assertion when the rumor was spread around the Internet that the RIAA believed that ripping CD music was illegal. The group cleared up the situation by saying that it doesn’t consider ripping illegal but that adding music recordings to a shared folder that can be accessed by others in a P2P file sharing program is illegal and should be stopped.
The ruling this week has shut those theories down however. U.S. District Judge Neil V. Wake tossed out all the RIAA’s motions including the “making available” and “offer to distribute” theories that pertained to “shared folders.”
The judgment could have long lasting effects in all of the RIAA’s music piracy cases as it is now harder for the group to prove that “a copyrighted file actually changed hands given the anonymous nature of file-sharing programs and the lack of cooperation from Internet service providers with these lawsuits.”
Result for: adding music
According to the New York Post, Facebook is reportedly considering adding music to its popular social networking site, either as streaming to compete with MySpace or as a pay-per-download site such as iTunes.
MySpace recently launched their streaming MySpace Music service and promptly hit 1 billion plays within 3 days.
Facebook would be joining up with either Rhapsody.com, iMeem.com, iLike.com or Lala.com, says the report and also notes that Facebook is in talks with the Big 4 labels.
“Facebook is a serious challenger to MySpace and they would certainly want to do anything that record labels would allow them to do with advertising-supported music,” said Phil Leigh, senior analyst at Inside Digital Media. “Advertising-supported revenue would be good for Facebook and certainly free access to recorded music would be good for Facebook members. It would be good for the labels, too. If the MySpace deal is working out well, then the labels would probably want to replicate that on Facebook.”
We will keep you updated with any developments.
