Amazon today announced a new version of its MP3 store, designed to work
on iPhone and iPod touch devices from Apple. The HTML5 web app now
allows iOS mobile device users to make direct purchases of tracks from Amazon’s
22 million song library via Safari, which will then make it instantly available
to Amazon’s Cloud Player app for those devices.
It’s a similar
move to what the company has already tried to do with its Kindle store for
e-books. Amazon launched an iPad-formatted version of that store last year (also in
January, coincidentally), accessible from the web, after Apple changed its App
Store rules to prevent third-party software from selling content through their
apps without giving Apple a cut. The lack of a direct sales channel
in-app for both e-books and music content means that Amazon is at a usability
disadvantage compared to Apple’s own media marketplaces, including iTunes and
the iBookstore.
With the
web-based Kindle Store, and now the new Amazon MP3 Store for iOS devices,
Amazon is narrowing the gap between itself and Apple’s own native offerings.
Users still have to use their browser to go to http://www.amazon.com/mp3
to access the new store, rather than being able to buy directly from within
Amazon Cloud Player, but they can bookmark the site and save it to their
device, and it’s a far easier process than going through the previous version
of the MP3 store that wasn’t optimized for Apple’s mobile devices.
Amazon touts
its MP3 library at over 22 million songs and over two million albums in the
U.S., which is getting closer to the iTunes catalogue size (somewhere around 28
million). Access to those songs for shoppers is now a key battleground, and
this could help Amazon considerably in that area, although it is worth noting
that we haven’t heard much about how the web-based, iPad-optimized Kindle
e-book store has helped conversions for Amazon in that arena. [TechCrunch]
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