This subject is getting worn out, but this blog post by Seth Godin is right on the spot. It’s amazing that the Big Five (well, not really five anymore) doesn’t get it.

The only new business niche they have gotten into is selling songs and ring tones to mobile phone owners and that was of course not their own idea. The mobile operators approached them with the concept. At first, the music industry was reluctant to the idea, but at least they gave it a try. Obviously they are now surprised that they can make money from something else then plastic discs.

Last year, I met one of the bosses from Sony BMG at a conference where he was talking about a successful deal they made with one of the European mobile operators. My guess is that he was the only one in the room that was surprised by the success.

This is really interesting, Amazon.com are now selling downloadable MP3s without any DRM protection. Plain vanilla MP3s that can be played in any MP3 capable player.

You don’t want to hear me rant on about DRM protection schemes, but they simply suck. All of them, for a number of reasons.

Awhile ago, iTunes Store started to sell DRM free music, but to a higher price than the protected downloads. That sucked, too, but I’ve been wondering which company would be able to compete with Apple and I had a hunch that it would be Amazon. Now they are launching the new site, already populated with 2 million songs. That’s not even close to the amount of songs iTunes offers, but it’s a good start.

Amazon is big enough to negotiate with the big labels, but they also have all the logistics in place to handle the smaller ones. After all, Amazon is already selling everything from baby shoes to gazebos from small manufacturers.

Being an Amazon affiliate, I’m quite excited about this. Even though MP3s are low ticket products, there should be enough room to earn affiliate commissions from this.

<shameless plug> Yes, my product AmazonHunter 2 does of course support the MP3 store… </shameless plug>

Link: Amazon MP3 store