music
oct 19
2008

MP3 Amazon Store

Robin goes to bat for the Amazon MP3 store. Are others using it? Update: @amazonmp3 provides daily sales on the site, including some entire albums for $1 or $2.
13 comments

I use it because it has no DRM and the files are good quality.

posted by Joel at 2008-10-19 14:48:50

Yup, I use Amazon's mp3 music store. If nothing else, it's usually cheaper than iTunes.

posted by Guy at 2008-10-19 17:13:33

I'm with Joel. No DRM and they're encoded at 256kbps. I don't like Apple telling me how I can use my music.

posted by Brad Barrish at 2008-10-19 18:02:02

I've switched from iTunes to amazon completely. interesting things i've noted is that i seem to buy more full albums from amazon but spend a little less overall, probably because there are no celebrity playlists, go fig.

posted by rob at 2008-10-19 23:01:11

I look on Amazon first, because there's no DRM, so I can share it with my wife's computer. The problem is that Amazon doesn't seem to have the selection of iTunes.

posted by peterme at 2008-10-19 23:12:51

I look on Amazon first, because there's no DRM, so I can share it with my wife's computer. The problem is that Amazon doesn't seem to have the selection of iTunes.

posted by peterme at 2008-10-19 23:12:51

I use it a fair amount. The site could use a good redesign. If anything, it looks more kmart than itunes and is fairly hard to locate new music. Despite the increased expense, if I were Amazon, I'd go to 320kps or FLAC to further distinguish the store from itunes. The cheap specials Amazon offers are a nice touch.

posted by Dean Wermer at 2008-10-19 23:28:05

Browsing and search are both terrible. But I usually know what I want before I arrive, so I'm not clicking around too much. Otherwise I love it. It's inexpensive and convenient and DRM-free.

posted by mat at 2008-10-20 01:50:49

It's all I use now. I never liked iTunes low-quality DRM'd stuff and never wanted to fiddle with any of the subscription models. I only got a song at iTunes if I couldn't find it anywhere else. <br /><br /> <br /><br /> I'd been pretty much otherwise stealing music since about 2000 or so, with a few cents going to the shady Russian sites here and there. All I ever wanted was good quality sound in mp3 format without DRM and easy to buy. With Amazon I got that and I've now spent more there on music in the past few months than I did on all music anywhere in the previous 9 years.<br /><br /> <br /><br /> I listen to Pandora at work and they've got a Buy At Amazon MP3 button that I click when I hear a song I like. Boom, bought it. I've found so much new music that way. When they make it easy for me, they get my money!<br /><br /> <br /><br /> Only thing I don't like about Amazon is their "helper" application. It would probably help my mom, but just gets in my way. I mostly buy singles so it doesn't usually apply, but if there's a case where I have to buy a whole album, I just install it, download the album, uninstall it, and then fix my filenames and locations back the way I wanted them. Wish I could skip that all the time, but overall I think Amazon is the way to go.

posted by Eric at 2008-10-20 03:26:11

Eric -- yes! The Pandora "Buy on Amazon" link is the best/worst thing ever. <br /><br /> <br /><br /> Pandora also has a "bookmark this song" feature that I'd never really used before, but now that you can, uh, buy *all* the songs you just bookmarked on Amazon w/ one click... it's dangerous.

posted by robin at 2008-10-20 03:43:06

I like redeeming Pepsi Stuff points for free Amazon MP3's, but I haven't been spending actual MONEY there, though.<br /><br /> <br /><br /> I used to be really good at collecting the iTMS Free Song of the Week years ago, but I think I stopped doing it as some sort of anti-DRM protest. Besides, all the INTERESTING free songs of the week were at the Japanese iTMS and I felt funny about registering a fake .jp address just to get their free song of the week.<br /><br /> <br /><br /> By the way, Amazon also used to have a lot of free MP3s available, and I believe they still do (especially Christmas tunes), but they're a helluva lot harder to find these days. Easier to use outside search engines than A9, for sure.

posted by CRZ at 2008-10-20 12:00:11

I use it for stuff I can't find on iTunes. I like it.

posted by Kurtis at 2008-10-21 12:50:02

If you are keen on the best compressed audio quality, use Amazon. They encode with <a href="http://lame.sourceforge.net/" target="_blank">LAME</a> using variable bit rate at high compression levels.

posted by Curtis at 2008-10-22 18:23:24