Amazon.com—From Books to Tunes

You’ve probably heard of Amazon.com, especially if you do any shopping online. Amazon is, quite simply, the world’s largest online retailer. Yes, Amazon sells MP3 music for download, but it also sells physical CDs—and CD players and portable music players and iPods and books and clothing and tools and lawn chairs and toys and just about anything you might want to buy.

Amazon opened its online doors in 1995 as an online bookstore, nothing more and nothing less. Having proven successful at bookselling, Amazon then expanded its offerings to include music, movies, video games, and other soft goods; it later diversified into all manner of hard goods, as well.

The Amazon MP3 Store was launched a dozen years after the online bookstore. At the September, 2007 launch, the MP3 Store offered more than 2 million tracks from more than 180,000 artists, from all the major labels and leading indies.