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October 8, 2007
Amazon Mp3 store
If you're not living under a rock, you'll know that a couple weeks ago Amazon launched an mp3 store that portends to compete with Apple in the digital music sales arena. I was initially skeptical because the Apple store is easy to use and tightly integrated with iTunes. You buy a song or TV show, and voila, it's in iTunes. The major difference between Apple and Amazon is that all songs purchased from Amazon are DRM free. Apple only sells some of their music without DRM, and I'm not sure it's possible to tell which ones are and which ones aren't -- I have no idea. For many, DRM is completely transparent. If you purchase from the Apple store (into iTunes) and only ever listen on your laptop or sync to an Apple device, then you'll never care about DRM. For me, I use a 3rd-party device that allows me to wirelessly stream music from my computer to my stereo. This works great unless you have DRM protected music. The device I use doesn't support DRM. Whenever I purchased a new, DRM protected album from iTunes, I had to first rip it to a CD and then re-import it into iTunes as mp3 files in order to remove the DRM. I then felt compelled to keep around two copies of the album, the purchased DRM version and and the non-DRM version. Needless to say, it was a pain.
As for my concern about ease of use and integration with iTunes, Amazon's service works great. You have to download and install an Amazon MP3 Downloader to help manage the download process. I'm not entirely sure why this is necessary, but I'm guessing it's to help ensure that your downloads were successfully downloaded, how many times they've been downloaded, allow you to pause and restart, etc. Since the Apple store is browsed only from within iTunes (read proprietary web browser), this sort of thing wasn't necessary. Since iTunes is such a good music player, none of us are mad that we have to use iTunes to browse their store. We weren't so happy when Microsoft did something similar with Internet Explorer, but I digress. Once the music is downloaded it's immediately available in iTunes, so integration with iTunes is seamless.
There were a few small hiccups with the store, but they weren't that big of a deal. After purchasing my first album, I tried to use the back button to browse for more albums and ended up downloading the album twice. When this happened, the first time download of the album was still processing so I had plenty of time to cancel the accidental re-download. Surprisingly, there wasn't a way to delete queued downloads in the Amazon Mp3 Downloader, so I had to let it download and then manually delete the second copy of the songs. Also, the installer didn't register the amz extension with the currently open Firefox window; perhaps that isn't possible. On restart Firefox recognizes the new extension fine and correctly launches the downloader.
From this point forward, if Amazon has the album, I'm going to purchase it there, I would suggest you do the same. If not, I'll still use iTunes. Oh yeah, just so Amazon gets the in the last word, many songs and albums are cheaper on Amazon. $0.89 cents a song versus $0.99 and $8.99 an album versus $9.99. The Crane Wife by The Decemberists was a full $2.00 cheaper.
[Update: If you enable iTunes Plus in the Apple store, you will always see the DRM free versions of songs/albums if available. The DRM free iTunes songs are more expensive individually at $1.29 a song, but it appears that you can still get the DRM free version of The Crane Wife through Apple for $9.99.]
Posted by mark at October 8, 2007 12:30 PM Subscribe (FeedBurner)
Comments
I've been pretty interested in the store, I read about it a week or so ago. I didn't realize there was a custom downloader though. Does this mean it's windows only, or perhaps win/mac only?
I would LOVE to be able to support something other than iTunes.
Posted by: Topher at October 9, 2007 8:14 AM
That's a good question. Here's the info from Amazon's FAQ:
"You can buy songs from any computer with a web browser capable of downloading files from the Internet. The MP3 files you purchase will download directly to your computer and are compatible with any system that can read the MP3 music format. The Amazon MP3 Downloader is a tiny application that is required for purchasing and downloading an entire album and is currently available for Mac and Windows operating systems. If you use Linux, you can currently buy individual songs. A Linux version of the Amazon MP3 Downloader is under development, and when released will allow entire album purchases."
So, hopefully 'under development' doesn't mean next year sometime.
Posted by: Mark D Veerman at October 9, 2007 9:42 AM
Dear Mark,
You are a corporate shill.
Love and kisses,
pcg
P.S. The Amazon MP3 store DOES look pretty swanky. :-) Although it's not quite as good a deal as you described it, AFAICT. Just as an example, NIN's Year Zero IS $7.99 for the album (yay!) but $0.99 per song (boo!). The $0.89 song seems to be a little hit or miss. Ah well, still an interesting alternative to iTunes. :-D
Posted by: pcg at October 9, 2007 4:05 PM
pcg: If you'll notice, I said, "many songs and albums are cheaper on Amazon. $0.89 cents a song versus $0.99 and $8.99 an album versus $9.99." that many songs, not ALL.
I heard this morning that Apple was in the process of lowering the price on their DRM free tunes to .99. Market forces at work!
Posted by: Mark D Veerman at October 17, 2007 12:38 PM
I just bought The Arcade Fire's Funeral and it worked without a hitch on my MacBookPro. The quality is pretty good too, 255kbps VBR.
It seems that by advocating DRM free purchases that Apple is opening itself up to more competition.
Posted by: Nathan at October 19, 2007 11:15 AM
Cool. Since I wrote this, Apple lowered the price of their non-DRM music to .99 from 1.29. Pretty cool to see market forces at work!
Posted by: Mark D Veerman at October 19, 2007 11:22 AM
Hey Mark - I am having the exact same issue you experienced with i-tunes. Virginia got that little MP3 player for Christmas, but the only way for me to get the files off of i-tunes and on to her player is re-ripping them as MP3's and a couple of songs that I purchased on itunes won't work...bummer. (Is there a way for me to get around the protected AAC files?) I remembered that you had blogged about this - so I came back to your post for advice...thanks. :)
Posted by: Jenny at December 22, 2007 2:07 PM