Works with
All iPods
The Good
No DRM
Good prices
Works with existing Amazon accounts
The Bad
Requires additional software
Smaller selection at launch than iTunes
Amazon’s search interface could be a bit smoother
The Price
Songs: US$0.89 - $0.99
Albums: Varies
AmazonMP3 is Amazon.com’s music download store, an offering poised to become the chief rival, and a true competitor, to iTunes’ dominance in the digital download market.
AmazonMP3 does essentially just what you’d expect it to – it offers the ability to buy and download single songs and full albums using Amazon’s standard interface and your Amazon account. If you already like Amazon’s interface, you’ll like this store. If you find the interface a little cluttered and sometimes hard to use (as I do), you’ll have the same opinion here.
Amazon’s store has a couple of points of differentiation from the iTunes Store. They are:
- All of Amazon’s music is free of DRM and encoded at 256 kbps for higher sound quality. ITunes only offers some tracks with DRM and at 256 kbps, through the iTunes Plus offering.
- Some songs cost $0.89, less than iTunes’ $0.99. Other songs cost $0.99.
- AmazonMP3 only offers 2 million songs for sale at its launch, as opposed to iTunes’ 6 million.
- The store does not yet offer things like videos, podcasts, and games for iPods as the iTunes Store does.
- AmazonMP3 requires installing the AmazonMP3 Downloader program that handles downloads and adds songs to iTunes automatically. This isn’t quite as smooth as iTunes’ integration, and having to install a new program is a little annoying, but the program works well.
The overall process of searching and browsing for music, buying it, and adding it to iTunes is fairly smooth and fast. The checkout process is Amazon’s standard, multi-step process that isn’t as streamlined as iTunes’, but once you’re through that, downloads of songs – even at the larger file sizes that 256 kbps encoding creates – are quick. In my testing, a 16.5 MB song only took about 20 seconds to download both the song and the album artwork.
AmazonMP3 is not perfect, nor is it quite as refined as the iTunes Store – yet. The site has only been active for about a week as of this writing. Given some time, the AmazonMP3 store looks to be a serious competitor to iTunes – perhaps the first real competitor Apple has had in the space. And that can only be good for consumers.
