A Cat’s View: To Compete With iTunes, The Big Four Step Into The Amazon Jungle..

With iTunes currently holding the rest of the legal music download market in a tight submission hold, if no one stood up then there was nothing to stop iTunes moving its way straight to the whole of the market.

But now all of the big four music companies (Sony BMG, Universal, EMI and Warner) have all taken a stand and teamed up with Amazons new download service to take on the might of iTunes..

But is it too little too late..?

 The iTunes store will of been open for 5 years this coming april, and in January it reached a total of 4 billion songs that had been bought and downloaded off of it. This is over 70% of the legal music download market. Basically in just under 5 years the iTunes store has took virtually a complete control of the market.

The history of the store ironically starts with the big four major music labels (or five back before Sony music entertainment and BMG merged) when a deal was signed with apple to create the store to distribute the music through the store, with apple keeping a cut of the money from each song sold.

The problem began when some of the companies started to think the deal was not good enough, as apple was making too much money from the project.

As the relations began to break down the Big Four were called upon to act against iTunes to gain some control over the music industry, the plan was to sell music online without any DRM, this would hopefully sway people to buy off the companies, as iTunes store sells its music with a form of DRM called FairPlay, which has several restrictions on the music and how the users can use and move this music.

EMI made the first move by annoucing they would release DRM free music through iTunes, although this was not an exclusive deal.

EMI then made another deal, this time with Amazon.com, who had started to try and take the might of iTunes on by starting it’s own online digital media store, hoping that Amazons already popular fan base would help it grow. But another incentive to buying off Amazon is that the whole libary of media is totally DRM free, unlike iTunes which has both DRM and DRM free songs.

The songs from the Amazon site are all in MP3 format, so they can be played on such a wide and varied range of devices, unlike the songs from iTunes which where AAC or MPEG4, which did not tend to work on many devices.

While the idea of DRM free music does seem like a good idea, and may look attractive, it would be easy for the music to be moved around too freely and could be shared illegally.  But at the same time it would very annoying as a user to not do what you want with a song you have downloaded from iTunes.

It would take a big name such as Amazon with something as attractive as DRM free music to even consider taking on the might and grip with iTunes, and with the big four music labels wanting more money and success, more than they have with iTunes already, they might all have to join up with amazon and release DRM free music to give themselves and Amazon a chance against the increasingly popular iTunes.