I finally got to play around with Amazon’s new MP3 store today. Hypebot has a roundup of posts about it; I especially like Daring Fireball’s take on the whole thing.
From a fan’s perspective, I absolutely love this store! My purchases so far:
- Various Artists – Guilt By Association
- Black Francis – Bluefinger
- Stars – In Our Bedroom After The War
Here are a few thoughts on it:
- Its a liberating and welcome feeling to browse digital music that’s free from DRM. I’m glad the environment is finally right for something like this from someone like Amazon.
- Amazon’s 1-click purchasing process makes it too easy to buy music. This is gonna be very addictive! I mean, even if I knew how to pirate music (which I don’t), when its this easy, why would I?
- Gift certificate balance is not applied toward your MP3 store purchase. That sucks.
- Installing a downloader is never ideal. It requires a user install, and only works on certain platforms. But the installer is small (like 500kb) and the downloads are smooth.
- A lot has been made about how Sony and Warner have yet to offer their catalogs. But honestly, for the music I listen to, I didn’t notice. Amazon is very well stocked with Indie titles.
- Where is Sub Pop? That means no Go Team, no Iron & Wine, no Flight of the Conchords, all of whom had new albums recently. Other big Indies like Matador and Merge are on there. This was an issue with Rhapsody in the early days, but over time they were able to build out their catalog, and I imagine it will be the same process for Amazon.
- Most of the Indie stuff is priced at 89 cents ($8.99/album) and below. Remember the days of Sam Goody? That’s like half of what CDs in tall cardboard packaging used to cost.
- This skew towards Indie is reflected in the download charts, where bands like The New Pornographers, M.I.A., and Spoon are all in the top 20.
- Speaking of top downloads, Feist is #1 in both the album and single categories (and #35 on the Billboard charts). That iPod commericial was huge for her!
- The search results interface is ugly. It makes sense once you orient yourself to it: artists at the top, singles underneath that, albums on the right. Still, there’s room for improvement.
- Tracks are previewed through the browser, so you can’t navigate away from the page while previewing an album. This hinders the browsing experience since the stream stops when you navigate away. Amazon’s strength has always been the ability to circulate users across the site to discover new stuff. It’d be nice to have some sort of popup preview player that you could queue tracks to as you visit other areas.
- A lot has been said about EMusic in the context of this new Amazon store. I was always hesitant to join EMusic because I couldn’t justify a subscription service with a monthly download cap. Today Amazon made me realize I can easily download more than $10 worth of music in a month (I just spent $27 in an hour)! I guess that makes the case for EMusic even stronger, huh?
- I am big fan of Other Music’s MP3 store, so it’ll be interesting to see where my loyalties go. Amazon has them beat right now (I ran into some issues with Other Music’s downloader), but Other Music may have some niche stuff not available on Amazon. Other Music also serves up 320kbps files versus Amazon’s 256kbps, if thats important to you.
- But Monsur, don’t you love Rhapsody? Why yes, yes I do. DRM-free files are great and all, but I’d still rather pay the $10 a month for a subscription service like Rhapsody. The real benefit to owning MP3 files is that they’ll play anywhere. And that’s my biggest gripe with Rhapsody: it doesn’t work in 64-bit Vista, it doesn’t work in Ubuntu, it doesn’t integrate with Windows Media Center, and it sometimes doesn’t work through the browser.
