Amazon Japan digital download service launched

Amazon Japan digital music store. Details is the beneath.

7 days to go! My mind is nowhere in Japan but in the UK! I will be there for a week. I will visit London and Glasgow, where I used to live for a year and a half in total. I'm a typical Japanese - very shy and reserved. However, I will have to be a bit wilder while I'm in the UK to enjoy socialising with people there. That sounds like I'm going to go crazy...Socialising is what I'm really bad at to be honest. I even really don't know if I can successfully manage to enjoy it this time. At the same time, however, I love to meet people. Hope I will enjoy that. Drop a line if you also will be either in London or Glasgow around the time :)

Incredible Glasgow School of Art

Anyway, this's just a newsflash - Amazon Japan finally launched a DRM-free MP3 download service this week. Click here to jump the store. The launch was delayed again and again and nobody really knew when it officially got launched. So this week's launch felt like a bit sudden thing. The interesting thing was...well, I was apparently one of the people who tweeted the news on twitter very early and my tweet got a lot of RTs. Most of them were very positive and everybody was like "Finally it's launched! Finally we can buy DRM-free digital music!!" To tell the truth, I didn't expect that that many people waited for the launch so it was good to know.

You might feel it is a little strange. Amazon MP3 store might be already opened in your country a long time ago. However, Japan is far behind those countries digital music wise. Physical music is still strong. Music downloading on PC was less popular compared to the US and Europe (nearly 90% of digital music delivery is done on mobile here). Only music subscription service Napster Japan was even shot down in this May I guess due to financial reasons. It's like Japan is going back to the past as opposed to the other countries go ahead. Bearing the situation in mind, I reckon the launch gave music fans in Japan a glimmer of hope. More and more people here start to realise that there is Spotify, there is Rhapsody, there is Mog....there are many new and innovative digital music services in the world *except* Japan. More Japanese music lovers figure out that these new services give a big excitement and joy of listening to music but they really can use none of them. Therefore I think Amazon digital download service is a big step for the Japanese digital music business to go forward. We now can see a bit brighter feature in front of us.