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I found an interesting article from ComputerWorld today, which states that a Wall Street Journal article this morning reported that Amazon is planning to launch an online music download service and Amazon-branded digital audio players.  Supposedly, owners of the Amazon-branded players would receive discounts on music downloads.  They also claim that we could see this service "as early as this summer."

Personally, I just don’t know at this point in the game if anyone can really compete with iTunes and the iPod.  Apple has consistently kept its #1 position in the digital music industry, and nobody has really even been more than a drop in the bucket compared to them.  We’ve seen large corporations like Yahoo, Wal-Mart, Microsoft, MusicMatch, Virgin, etc all launch fairly good music download services, some of which offer significantly lower prices than Apple’s iTunes.  While these services do get a good amount of business, Apple is still way out in the lead and doesn’t seem to be losing much (if any) ground to them.

So what will Amazon do differently to make themselves stand out among the existing services, especially iTunes?  Will offering music discounts to owners of an Amazon-branded audio player really help them gain a ton of members?  Possibly, but that really depends on how the device stacks up to the iPod and other popular audio players.  If it’s just your average run-of-the-mill DAP, then I just don’t see Amazon being a very serious threat to Apple or the other existing services.

If this news becomes reality, and we do see an Amazon music service and/or audio player, it will be interesting to see what they have to offer.  If they’re just looking to get in on the action, then I’d imagine it will be a big failure for a historically successful company.  If they truly have some secret plan to launch a unique service/player that has something to offer that we haven’t seen before, then who knows what could happen…

Source: ComputerWorld

Chris Leckness (3530 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

Chris Leckness is the Owner/Administrator of Mobilitysite. He is a Microsoft MVP, Mobile Devices and a member of the exclusive focus group, Mobius. Chris runs a Mobilitysite, GotZune, and a few other smaller sites and blogs. His personal blog is chris.leckness.com.