Amazon rumors continued

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, especially given that Amazon is in business to serve its customers, not the business models of the major labels.

• As I predicted, 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.