Amazon appears to be in talks with various music labels about starting a subscription service, adding to its already Amazonian-size empire of offerings.
According to "multiple sources" who spoke with The Verge, the talks "have been described as very informal." NBC News contacted Amazon for comment, and will update this post if we hear back.
The Web retail giant may be interested in creating an "on-demand service that sounds pretty similar to Spotify," The Verge noted. And, as its Kindle devices grow in popularity, along with the iPad, it's may be looking to take a bigger bite out of Apple's popular iTunes service.
Amazon has added some new features to its music-buying program in the past year. Its Cloud Player lets users stream, download and manage their music library via Amazon servers, and the company even created an iPhone app for it.
It also added "scan and match" to Cloud Player, which lets Amazon scan a user's iTunes or Windows Media Player libraries in order to match songs to those in Amazon's catalog. All those matched songs, no matter where they were purchased from, then become available in Cloud Player.
Most recently, "AutoRip" was announced. It gives customers free digital versions of the music CDs they buy (or previously bought) from Amazon. The music files are stored in Amazon's data centers and available for download through Cloud Player.
Amazon's 22 million-song MP3 catalog has also been made available to Apple iOS users via an optimized mobile Safari Web browser experience.
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