AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

Bruised music majors back iTunes rival - Financial Times

Next month’s Super Bowl will feature a sales promotion that is audacious even by that event’s over-inflated standards: Amazon.com, the largest online retailer, will offer as many as 1bn free downloads from its new digital music store in partnership with Pepsi and singer Justin Timberlake.

The promotion represents a coming-out party for the Amazon MP3 service, which launched in September. But it also poses a question: is a viable competitor to Apple’s iTunes digital music store finally on the horizon?

Five years ago, the major music companies – Universal Music, Sony BMG, Warner Music and EMI – embraced iTunes for pioneering a legal digital music market. These days, however, they are chafing under its dominance and eager for alternatives.

Their chief complaints are iTunes’ uniform pricing policies, in which all songs sell for 99 cents, and Apple’s unwillingness to install more robust anti-piracy protections on the iPod to stop illegal copying of music. Their frustration has only grown as double-digit falls in sales of compact discs, their lifeblood, make them desperate to reap greater profits from digital music.

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