Month: October

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In 2008, Amazon has made several deals to help further itself as a download service for digital music. They signed up Pepsi to offer redeemable codes for downloads and other merch at Amazon, as well as making a deal with Rockstar Games to allow players to tag songs from the soundtrack while playing Grand Theft Auto IV to download off Amazon at a later time. Now, Amazon has made two new moves. It is now the digital music sales provider behind MySpace Music and is also the mobile music vendor for Google's new Android mobile phone platform. These are important moves and Amazon has come a long way, but it is still far behind Apple and not yet a threat to iTunes. At the end of 2008, Amazon will have sold 130 million songs, compared to the 2.4 billion songs expected to be sold off iTunes. It is expected for Amazon's sales to surge 60%, up to 208 million in 2009 if they continue to make such deals. Amazon also has the backing of the industry in the sense that everyone is looking for something to seriously compete with Apple's iTunes to have leverage in digital music sales. Other companies like to partner with Amazon because it has DRM-free digital music, unparalleled ecommerce research, providing affiliates with 20% of the revenue from any song purchase (compared to Apple's 5%), and also there is Amazon's Web Services developer program. Its designed to integrate its commerce features with a given site without requiring users to navigate to Amazon's site. Execs say that all the ingredients are there for Amazon to drive rapid expansion.