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In fact, the tragedy is that Amazon could have built this store 10 years ago — the music labels simply wouldn’t allow it. What’s happened now is that the music label executives — at least at Universal and EMI — have finally gotten it through their thick skulls that it’s the iPod that drives iTunes sales, not the other way around. Apple’s FairPlay DRM isn’t (at least primarily) some sort of lock-in scheme to force people to buy iPods; FairPlay was a requirement stipulated by the labels, without which they would not have allowed Apple to sell their music at all.

By the way, if you install the amazonmp3 downloader, you get a free Apples in Stereo song to (a) test that the downloader works correctly, and (b) force you to walk through the process of buying an amazonmp3 track for the first time. Objective (b) is enormously effective in lowering any residual cognitive barriers to buying tracks over the Web (as opposed to the iTMS). Minor gripe with the process: Even though the track is free, Amazon will demand that you supply a credit card and billing address (presumably this is because the amazonmp3 store is US-only at the moment, as enforced by those bits of info).