I have been really pleased with Amazon’s music download sales, they give you very high quality MP3 files with no restrictions on what you can do with the files built into the files. Their selection is good, they have just added Warner Brothers to the line up and while they don’t have all the small labels they are good for names you have heard of. Like most people I just click through the terms and agreements stuff, but it turns out I should have been reading them here.

It seems Amazon isn’t actually selling me the files, they are licensing them to me. This comes with restrictions, for example I could not buy a bunch, copy them to a cd or USB drive then give them to someone else even if I delete them from my system. This is annoying, but as they have no real way of knowing when this happens not overly fatal, but Cory Doctrow over at Boing Boing points out the real reason they are doing this, it is so the record companies can screw the musicians. Surprise! You see they have to pay a higher royalty when a song is sold then when one is licensed. So by not ’selling’ the song I download to me the record company gets to keep gets to keep forty-two and a half cents that would otherwise go to the artist. To Amazon it is the same whether it is a sale or a license, the only people it matters to are the artist and the record company. Next time you hear them lobbying about how important the record companies are for the protection of the artists remember this one.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 28th, 2007 at 1:04 pm and is filed under Copyright, Internet, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.