Amazon Charts Record Year-End Sales; Adds Warner To MP3 Store

Unlike many retail giants of mostly brick-and-mortar, chain-linked proportions headquartered in the US, Amazon has shown a nice finish to 2007. The company, one of the largest of all online retail outlets, displayed a record number of sales this month – 5.4 million for the day of December 10th alone - effectively pushing the marketplace to a 13-year high, reported the London Times yesterday.

And there’s more. The mega-success, in tandem with the Warner Music Group, also revealed earlier this week that it had added the record company’s catalogue to its music download store, dubbed AmazonMP3, which it first unveiled in late September of this year. Warner’s addition to Amazon’s collection raises the number of total songs carried by the still-very-new digital marketplace to roughly 2.9m.

Bezos & Co are moving along a pretty impressive clip, wouldn’t you agree? Yes, all seems to be going perfectly well for the Seattle-based consumer favorite. It’s capped an impressive 2007 with top-notch figures. It’s gained the good graces of three of the Big Four in music. Could it possibly get any better?

Certainly. With more growth and the recruitment of the last of the music industry holdouts, headlined by Sony BMG, we say much better.

Online sales, despite their substantial rise over the last several years, remain relatively small in number when juxtapositioned against the entirely physical retail space in the US. That means there is essentially much room yet for expansion. With the Web’s gradual transition in becoming more and more a commonplace platform upon which Americans in general do business, expansion there most definitely shall be.

Digital download sales are presumably bound for increases as well in the months and years to come – perhaps of exponential proportions, even – and such a trend would only give Amazon more options to take its MP3 store to the next level, as it were, where it would inevitably face iTunes in a serious head-to-head challenge for the majority share of the market. A still rather young market, at that.

There’s little - if anything whatsoever – to say negatively about Amazon at present. Perhaps one might argue that its growth may eventually lead to its getting hold of a disproportionate amount of control over the American arena, and thus it is something that could use a good challenging of its own by another party. But unless once can effectively argue a dangerously unfair advantage for Amazon through an analysis of online ad sales and the company’s relations with product manufacturers and suppliers, we dare say it’s free as its finances allow to attempt to reach notable new heights.

The same message of course applies to any current and future competitors as well.