It’s On: Amazon Unleashing $900 Million In Expenditures This Year…

If you think Amazon is overspending on their music strategy, you’re right. And that’s just the way CEO Jeff Bezos likes it. In fact, according to an estimate from Goldman analyst James Mitchell, Amazon’s capital expenditures will top $900 million this year alone.  

The trickle-down into music seems unmistakeable.  The company is always slashing-and-burning the cost of MP3s, and frequently trading losses for market share.  But the critical question is whether discounting MP3s and grabbing share against iTunes counts as innovation.  Meanwhile, Amazon’s consumer-facing Cloud Drive may simply be overpriced, especially given the gargantuan collections of many music fans.

But this is one company that could ‘figure things out,’ and Bezos isn’t shy about the approach – not one bit.  “Invention is in our DNA and technology is the fundamental tool we wield to evolve and improve every aspect of the experience we provide our customers,” Bezos wrote shareholders. 

Music wasn’t mentioned in the wordy address – at least not directly – though the timing was a bit awkward.  Amazon Web Services just survived a huge outage last week, and the company has now admitted a small loss in customer data (that is, 0.07%).  Which sounds like nothing, unless it’s your data we’re talking about.  “The advances in data management developed by Amazon engineers have been the starting point for the architectures underneath the cloud storage and data management services offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS),” Bezos explained.

Source: Digital Music News