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DRM deathwatch: Warner on Amazon

Warner Music is offering its catalog on Amazon's DRM-free music store, leaving Sony/BMG alone as the last major-label holdout.

Matt Rosoff
Matt Rosoff is an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, where he covers Microsoft's consumer products and corporate news. He's written about the technology industry since 1995, and reviewed the first Rio MP3 player for CNET.com in 1998. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mattrosoff.
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Matt Rosoff

Amazon's digital music store, Amazon MP3, is now offering songs administered by Warner Music in the DRM-free MP3 format. This gives the store 2.9 million tracks, and leaves Sony/BMG as the last major label holdout. Not bad, considering Amazon MP3 launched only in September and is technically still in beta.

Amazon also said that 2007 wasits best holiday season since it opened in 1994--and it wasn't just a strong economy, as other retailers reported a generally weak season. But I don't know if Amazon's effectively using its traffic to promote its digital offering: when you run a search for an artist at the Amazon home page, audio CDs tend to dominate the search results, with downloads coming quite far down the first page.