Sony BMG Music Entertainment announced this week that it plans to sell some of its DRM-free music directly to customers in the US and Canada, state news reports.
This comes after news that the conglomerate resisted selling songs from its catalogue without embedding Digital Rights Management coding, which prevented them from being copied. It was the last major music label that was holding out against selling music online without copy protection.
Sony BMG announced that Amazon.com’s digital music store would carry songs by its artists through a system called Platinum MusicPass. The system will start on 15 January with 37 song titles. In order to download, one would have to buy a $12,99 card in person at stores such as Best Buy or Target, then log on and download music.
Although Amazon will sell these songs, it only does so in the MP3 format, which can be burned onto CDs, copied to multiple PCs and played on a number of digital media players, including Apple’s iPod, Microsoft’s Zune, Creative Zen, Macs, iPhone, RAZR and Blackberry.
