Amazon gets in the game

Amazon is entering the digital music market. Though they will surely use a fixed price model, hopefully they will apply their highly lauded recommendation technology at the album and track level. Clearly, this will be a strictly retail experience with no community aspect at all.


It will be interesting to see what becomes of this pre-loaded device project. Though I refuse to admit that the album format is dying (mainly because I still think in terms of albums), one of the major upsides of the digital music market has been its ability to satisfy the pent-up demand for single songs. It seems like it would difficult for even the savviest of marketers/product development people to populate an mp3 player with enough consistently targeted music to make the overall product attractive. In addition, I would hate to think that my personal music taste is bland enough to be satisfied by the calculated formulation of such an offering.