Rumors of Amazon acquiring eMusic were rife a couple of months ago, but are now deemed dead, at least for now. Hypebot had a lot of coverage of this (search for “amazon” and “emusic”) and I posted a lot about this on Swindleeeee.com as well (check out the “amazon” category). The net net as far as I’m concerned is that the eMusic subscription model wouldn’t fit well into Amazon’s current model, and Amazon could duplicate most if not all of eMusic’s features on its own.

In my opinion Amazon opening up a digital download store is all about integrated sales of digital tracks/albums and CDs, leveraging Amazon’s existing music recommendation features, and cross-selling MP3 devices. I don’t think Amazon will threaten Apple and the iTunes Store in the near term, but it could definitely eclipse eMusic as the number 2 service.