Amazon.com Inc. said Thursday it will offer users free digital copies of CDs bought on its site, as it competes with Apple and Google to attract music lovers choosing to store their songs on the Web.
The new service, called Amazon AutoRip, gives access to MP3 versions of tracks from an initial batch of 50,000 albums, including Overexposed by Maroon 5 and Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. The service is retroactive, so anyone who has bought CDs from Amazon since it started selling music in 1998 can claim a copy.
While Amazon was the first company to move music to the cloud — storing content on the Internet for access on any device — its Cloud Player is still trailing Apple’s iTunes and has new rivals in Google and Spotify Inc. In the second quarter, Apple had 64 percent of the market for digital music, compared with 16 percent for Amazon and 5 percent for Google, according to research firm NPD Group Inc.