Amazon.com DRM-Free Service Won’t Kill Apple (AMZN, AAPL)

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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What happens when an online retailer like Amazon.com (AMZN-NASDAQ) gets to compete against Steve Jobs and Apple (AAPL-NASDAQ) at the race to DRM-free music downloads?  The most likely truth may be not that much.

Amazon.com has announced a DRM-Free MP3 download store that will be exclusively in the MP3 format.  EMI will be licensing their 12,000+ record label catalog to Amazon in the deal.  So they are going for a platform neutral music service that will allow songs to be burned onto CDs for personal use.  It should be known that at least a version of this agreement from Amazon.com has been anticipated after EMI signaled it was planning to do DRM-free music.

The real truth to this is that Amazon.com is basically getting to join the club since Jobs was the first or at least the most vocal for this move.  Amazon.com shares are up 0.5% at $60.88.  If this was going to be a true iTunes killer, then AAPL shares would not likely be up the same 0.4% this morning.  There are probably too many iTunes and iPod loyalists out there for this to be a true Apple-killer of a deal.

Jon C. Ogg
May 16, 2007

Jon Ogg can be reached at [email protected]; he does not own securities in the companies he covers.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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