With 2013 come and gone I think now is an appropriate time to reflect upon the advancements the music industry has made in combating piracy.
Personally I would dub 2013 as “the year of the streams”. With the launch of Apple’s iTunes Match, and Google’s streaming service in the middle of 2013 the market feels slightly over saturated with too many music streaming options. The bad news is, 2014 probably isn’t going to stray away from streaming. There is speculation going around that Amazon is planning to launch its own streaming service later this year.
On the topic of Amazon, I think they should be commended for of the innovative ideas they have contributed to the industry in 2013. I am talking specifically of Amazon’s Autorip service. Autorip is a service that launched earlier this year, and one I (surprisingly) have not mentioned on this blog up until this point. The service allows users who buy physical CDs from Amazon’s online retail store to immediately download a free MP3 version of that album for free. In practice however, because most consumers buy their music digitally, the service has become an incentive for consumers to pay a little bit more for their digital copy to get a CD in the mail a couple days later. While there is no data to prove whether or not Autorip’s service has rekindled CD sales, purely from a personal point of view I can say with certainty that every time I buy an entire album online I use Amazon opt in for the service.
