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Digital
Amazon MP3 launches in Japan
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 15 November 2010
Amazon MP3 has launched in Japan, which is only really news because it is the first digital rights management free download store to launch in the country. The Japanese major labels, always a bit of a law unto themselves, have not followed the lead of their counterparts elsewhere in the world, who dropped demands that downloads be only sold with DRM technology attached a few years back.
In Japan, iTunes tracks still come with DRM attached, while Napster left the market completely earlier this year because it couldn’t make MP3s available to its customers there. To be fair, the Japanese majors have had less need to end their love affair with DRM because the digital market there is dominated by mobile-based services, where the issue of digital rights management has always been less controversial.
Amazon’s insistence that it would only enter the digital download market if the majors agreed to sell their music in the DRM-free iPod-compatible MP3 format arguably led to DRM being dropped in the rest of the world. The same policy has been applied to the Japanese market, though so far Amazon has only convinced EMI – first to drop DRM in the West too – to licence music to its download store.
