DRM News

The US Justice Department is in the early stages of investigating Apple’s business tactics in the digital music market, according to an article in the New York Times.

While the investigation is still very early and general in scope, investigators have apparently asked about a specific allegation that Apple has recently used their dominant position in the marketplace to keep labels from giving exclusive music access to Amazon’s digital music service as part of a promotion (reported by Billboard).

Amazon was asking music labels to give it the exclusive right to sell certain forthcoming songs for one day before they went on sale more widely. In exchange, Amazon promised to include those songs in a promotion called the “MP3 Daily Deal” on its Web site.

The magazine reported that representatives of Apple’s iTunes music service were asking the labels not to participate in Amazon’s promotion, adding that Apple punished those that did by withdrawing marketing support for those songs on iTunes.

Many tracks were pulled from the Amazon promotion by labels not willing to risk losing sales due to lowered marketing muscle from Apple, whose hold on the digital music market as a whole is growing rapidly.