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 2:48 PM on October 19, 2008 
Yup, I use Amazon's mp3 music store. If nothing else, it's usually cheaper than iTunes.
posted by Guy at 5:13 PM on October 19, 2008
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 6:02 PM on October 19, 2008
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 11:01 PM on October 19, 2008
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 11:12 PM on October 19, 2008
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 11:12 PM on October 19, 2008
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 11:28 PM on October 19, 2008
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 1:50 AM on October 20, 2008
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.
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.
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!
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 3:26 AM on October 20, 2008
Eric -- yes! The Pandora "Buy on Amazon" link is the best/worst thing ever.
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 3:43 AM on October 20, 2008
I like redeeming Pepsi Stuff points for free Amazon MP3's, but I haven't been spending actual MONEY there, though.
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.
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 12:00 PM on October 20, 2008
I use it for stuff I can't find on iTunes. I like it.
posted by Kurtis at 12:50 PM on October 21, 2008
If you are keen on the best compressed audio quality, use Amazon. They encode with LAME using variable bit rate at high compression levels.
posted by Curtis at 6:23 PM on October 22, 2008
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