Amazon Explores Niches With Specialty Music Stores - "Go Indie" Opens

Amazon is making it easier for its customers discover new music with an increasing number of specialty mini-sites that offer discount pricing and group releases in interesting ways.  Examples include Classical Blowout, Music For Entertaining - "Your Tunes Set The Tone", and now Go Indie including a "Music You Should Hear" podcast series which is amusingly offered via iTunes. (There are after all other ways to distribute a podcast than via a competing music store.) Go Indie features 700 releases (150 on sale at $9.99) and videos from the Black Keys, Air, The Shins, Sam Bush, Robyn Hitchcock and CéU.

“In this day and age, it’s rare that a retailer carries the full range of our releases, so thank God for Amazon.com,” said Andy Kotowicz, VP of Sub Pop Records. More than 30 music labels are participating including: Alligator Records, Anti, Astralwerks, Barsuk, Beggars Group, Bloodshot Records, Compass Records, Domino Records, Epitaph, Fat Possum, Hellcat, Koch Records, Matador, Megaforce, Mute, New West, Putumayo, Rykodisc, Sci Fidelity, Silva, Six Degrees, Smithsonian Folkways, Spin Art, Sub Pop, Sugar Hill, Touch N Go, Ultra, Vagrant, World Music Network and Yep Roc.