Amazon vs. iTunes
I bought some new music online the other night. It was easy, cheap, and the songs appeared directly in my iTunes library and synced up with my iPod without a hitch as usual. I've done this many times before so it wasn't really noteworthy, except this time I didn't buy any of the music on iTunes Music Store. And I don't think I will again.
I should say that I'm a little old school in terms of buying music. Of my 4000+ track music collection only 90 songs have been purchased online. In the past I would typically buy CDs and rip them to MP3s, and now have over 400 CDs in my "physical" collection (collecting dust in the basement, truth be told). But most of the 90 tracks I have purchased online have been singles bought in the last year.
So when I was putting together a playlist for a
party the other night, I was just about to click
in iTunes when I thought "why
not try out Amazon.com?" I'd heard they had a
good collection, all DRM-free, with equal or
better pricing than iTunes. And you can
usually count on Amazon.com to make the buying
experience simple and smooth. So I surfed over
to Amazon.com, searched for the Psychedelic
Furs "Love My Way" and bought my first
MP3 on Amazon.com.
The first time you purchase an MP3 on Amazon.com, it installs an application that manages the file download process and automatically adds the files to your iTunes library. The files are fully tagged and include artwork just like a song you would by from the iTunes Music Store. Additional purchases have a very similar experience to iTMS: search for a song, play a sample of it if you like, one click to buy and in a few seconds it's in iTunes.
Amazon's MP3s are also pretty high quality, encoded at or near 256 kbps, some using variable bit-rate and others using constant bit-rate. I also noticed that they use the LAME 3.x encoder, considered by many to be one of the best MP3 encoders out there.
In all I bought 10 singles and one 13-track album, spending a total of $17.61. Of the 10 singles I purchased, 8 were $0.99, and 2 were $0.89. The album was $7.97. Had I purchased these on iTMS I would have paid an additional $2.22 or 12.5% more (all of the songs were $0.99 on iTMS and the album was $9.99, and interestingly enough none of the songs I bought were available in iTunes Plus DRM-free format).
So not only did I save a couple of bucks, but more importantly I purchased DRM-free music where I'm not limited on how and where I can play my music. And the purchasing experience was about as close to a fully-iTunes-integrated solution as you could get without the software being written by Apple. Apple may need to swallow a bit of it's pride and go back to the record companies to work out DRM-free deals with everyone or they may be in for a tough fight with Amazon.com over digital music.