Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2007 > September > 25 > Entry
Amazon’s MP3 service launches: it’s good!
I’ve got nothing against iTunes, but Amazon’s new MP3 store is already a worthy competitor, even as a beta product.
With almost no fuss, I was able to download a John Lennon song and a Radiohead song for 89 cents and 99 cents, respectively. Amazon asks you to install a small application that keeps track of your downloads. You can preview tracks the way you would on iTunes and purchase a track or whole album. (Some artists, like Radiohead, require whole-album purchases to access some of their songs).
The Amazon MP3 application tracks the download progress (extremely fast for my two downloads) and automatically copies the songs to iTunes. If you don’t have iTunes, the songs can be copied to Windows Media Player. The album artwork copies over as well. Everything works quickly and painlessly.
The big advantage Amazon will have over iTunes is that its songs are in MP3 format and don’t feature copy protection, also known as Digital Rights Management (DRM). You can copy the songs to any device you have without the restrictions that Windows Media or iTunes protection places on music files. They’re also 256 kps, a higher-quality bit rate than the copy-protected music on iTunes.
I haven’t tried out the Mac version, but Amazon has a downloading application for OS X, and I’m guessing it works just as well.
iTunes leads by far the digital music market, but Amazon is stepping up to the plate with a product that so far is very easy to use, competitively priced and with fewer restrictions than Apple’s service. The digital music war just got a lot more interesting.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment Categories: Internet, Shopping
Comments
By Brocktoon
October 1, 2007 3:17 PM | Link to this
Great post, Omar!
I'm a Mac user and I've purchased a few songs from Amazon. Here are my thoughts �
I had a little trouble downloading, but nothing serious: the first song I downloaded (in spite of having previously downloaded and installed Amazon's "downloader" application) did not copy into iTunes as it should have. The second one did. However, it also downloaded twice (although as near as I can tell, I only got charged once). Weird.
I'd watch out touting the "competitive pricing line," though � one song was 89 cents, the other 99 cents. I honestly didn't find a lot of music I wanted for 89 cents � most of it was 99 cents, and some was a great deal more than 99 cents. Some tracks there are $1.49. Clearly this variable pricing structure is what led the labels to allow the Amazon store to sell DRM-lite (I won't say "free," because they are watermarked) songs when they have been so reluctant to allow Apple to do so.
The other thing about the Amazon store: it's great if you know exactly what you want. But a good deal of the stuff on my iPod is there because I just chanced upon it while browsing at the iTunes Music Store. That's music I never would have known about, much less purchased, had the Amazon store been my only choice. It's not a place to browse.
My hope: Other labels will open up to Steve Jobs' call to allow DRM-free music to be sold.
My fear: Success at Amazon will allow the labels to force Apple into variable pricing at the iTMS, and we'll all be paying $1.49 for popular tracks wherever we shop.
Oh, one last thing � you wrote, "(Amazon's downloads are) also 256 kps, a higher-quality bit rate than the copy-protected music on iTunes."
That would be accurate if Apple's songs were encoded with the same compression scheme (MP3) but they're not. Clearly, it is a HIGHER bit rate, but quality isn't always measured that way. Apple's AAC-encoded tracks are pretty universally accepted to be equal in quality to MP3 tracks using twice the bit rate.
Anyway, few of Amazon's songs are encoded at 256 kbps � most use variable bitrate encoding, which will encode different parts of the same song at different bit rates, some 256 kbps, some substantially lower.
Okay, enough geeking out. I need to go do something manly.