WareWolf Development - Tim Fisher » Here’s why Amazon MP3 Downloads are the way to go…

Here’s why Amazon MP3 Downloads are the way to go… February 12, 2008

Posted by Tim in : Music, Technology , trackback

The other day, I decided to try out MP3 downloads from Amazon.com for the first time. From this point forward, I don’t think I’ll be able to stress enough to the people I know that this is the way to purchase music online. Now, before I get flamed from all of the iTunes zealots, try to read calmly and imagine a world where music might be purchased from somebody other than Steve Jobs.

Maybe I should give a little background before I delve into why I instantly became such a fan of the Amazon method. First of all, I am actually a Zune owner. I know, I know…I should make it a point to hang out with the 7 or 8 other Zune owners in the world. Maybe I’ll post some other time about why the Zune is underrated as a media device, but for now, I just want that to be a level-set for where I’m coming from. Second, I’ve never owned an iPod, but my wife is on her second one and I have used iTunes enough to know that I can’t stand it. To be fair, though, I can’t really stand the Zune software either. Finally, as much as I may dislike iTunes or the Zune software, my unadulterated hatred is reserved for DRM. Some readers may not be familiar enough with DRM to hate it as much as I do so let me discuss it briefly.

DRM, or Digital Rights Management, is the practice of copy-protecting digital media. This is something else that deserves an entire posting of its own, so to make it short and sweet, DRM makes it so that if you buy music from iTunes, you can’t play it on a Zune. Likewise, music purchased from Zune couldn’t be played on an iPod. Those of you who are familiar enough with the system will maybe point out that you can burn the music to CD to strip out the DRM and then rip it back to your computer so that it can then be played on any device. But if you’ve ever had more than a handful of songs you need to do that to, you know that it’s much more painful and time-consuming than it sounds. So unless you’ve been diligent about doing that as you purchased music, or you want to spend a couple days de-DRM’ing everything, you’d better hope you really like whatever player you picked and got locked into. It is true that iTunes offers some DRM-free music (from the EMI label, I believe), but at this point, most songs are still protected.

Okay, so how does Amazon fit into the equation? The thing I like most about it and the reason that I even decided to try it in the first place is that the songs you download from Amazon are completely DRM-free. You can download and play them on any player that I’m aware of. On top of that, they are higher quality tracks (256 kbps) and quite possibly cheaper than on iTunes. For example, the album I decided to try for my first experience was James Blunt, All the Lost Souls. I paid $8.99 for it. If I would have used iTunes, I would have paid $9.99. Likewise, in the Zune Marketplace, the same album is $10.00 (actually 800 points with the convoluted scheme Microsoft uses where 100 points is equivalent to $1.25).

So the music is higher quality, possibly cheaper, and the real kicker…it has no DRM. Even with those benefits, I was concerned about what the “experience” would be like. While I pointed out that I really dislike the iTunes interface in general, it would be hard to argue the point that it makes purchasing music online, getting it into your library, and subsequently onto your device about as painless as it could be. The Zune experience is basically the same once you bone up on your currency conversion skills. I really had the feeling that despite the benefits of buying from Amazon, the experience would end up being not quite seamless enough for the average user to step outside iTunes. To say that I was pleasantly surprised is certainly understating things. As it turns out, aside from hiring an assistant to do it all for you, I don’t see how it could really get much simpler.

The first thing I did after finding the music I wanted was to install a very small downloader client on my PC. It looked like they offered versions for Windows XP and Vista, as well as Mac OS X. I am using Vista, but I’m assuming the XP and OS X versions would essentially be the same. It was an extremely quick install and now that it’s done, I won’t have to worry about it the next time I purchase music. With that downloader app, you are able to specify where you want downloaded songs to get saved on your computer. The default on Vista is an Amazon subdirectory under the user’s default music directory. I changed mine to go straight to the music folder instead of to the Amazon subdirectory. Within the browser, I had the option of using Amazon’s 1-Click technology to purchase the album. Since I’ve ordered from Amazon before and they already have my data, the tracks immediately appeared in the download client and went straight into my music folder. Now for me, using the Zune software, all I had to do was open up Zune and it automatically added the new album to my collection. I also noticed that the default behavior of the client app is to automatically add downloaded songs to the user’s iTunes library. Since I don’t use iTunes for my music collection, however, I went ahead and turned that off. That’s it. So aside from the one difference of using the browser instead of iTunes or Zune to find the music, the “experience” was essentially no different.

All in all, I can say without hesitation that I will now always check Amazon first when I am ready to purchase music online. I will also tell anybody I know who gets music online to try it, too. If I’m looking for something that Amazon doesn’t have, then I guess I’ll have to revert to Zune or iTunes followed by burning to a CD and ripping back to the computer to get rid of the DRM. Or I’ll just wait and buy the CD in the store. But here’s to hoping that most of what I end up wanting is included in the more than 2,000,000 songs that Amazon has!