Filed under: Audio, Business, Internet
Amazon launches digital music store
Now that a beta version of the site is live, here's what we can tell you.
- Amazon has signed a deal with EMI, Universal, and a boatload of independent labels.
- Amazon's library includes over 2 million tracks from more than 180,000 artists.
- All songs are in MP3 format, meaning you can play them on pretty much any computer or portable media device.
- Songs are encoded at 256 kbps.
- Most songs will sell for $.89 to $.99.
- The top 100 songs will sell for $.89.
- Album prices range from $5.99 to $9.99, with the top 100 albums going for $8.99 or less in most cases.
- There's a new Amazon MP3 Downloader that lets you download files directly to your iTunes or Windows Media Player libraries.
Of course, we lived in a different world then, when Napster was in its infancy and record labels assumed that if you sold one unprotected MP3 file it would be uploaded to a file-sharing site where 50,000 people would download it for free. Well, they might still believe that, but they also realize that consumers might not want to be locked into a single device for all eternity.
I don't know if this is a labor of love or merely the brainchild of four very gifted games designers, but Level Up is a really weird mash-up of gaming elements that you have probably never seen in a Flash game before.
Let's start with the premise itself: Groundhog Day meets Memento. The game experience revolves around 'days': you explore the world and the clock slowly ticks towards the evening. You bounce around picking up gems and talking to the denizens of 'Level Upland'. Eventually you feel tired and head back to ...
