Amazon MP3 is one of the best stop for buying unprotected music online at very affordable prices. Unlike iTunes, Rhpasody and Napster, it doesn’t offer restrictions from Digital Rights Management. It works well with iTunes and offers high quality Mp3 files, encoded at 256 kbps.
There are two million songs available and it offers choices from major record labels, independent artists and older bands. It has strong support from Mac OS X. The singles, which cost in between $.89 to $.99, sound great, accompanied with a high-resolution album art. Album prices on the other hand start as low as $4.99.
Downloading is easy. It could either be done directly from the web browser although it’s more advisable to use the Amazon MP3 downloader. This downloader is a tiny program that lets you automatically add tracks to iTUnes or Windows Media Player library.
Despite the seemingly limited number of music choices from Amazon MP3 (as compared to iTunes’ 6 million titles), all the music downloaded here is free from DRM, meaning there are no embedded secret tracking codes in the files, unlike in iTUnes where 1/3s of the selection is most likely have DDR. Transferring tracks to CDS and portable MP3 players are much easier.
Summing up Amazon MP3 store’s audio quality, affordable prices and user-friendliness, this store is definitely iTUnes most terrific rival in online music store industry. Completely trashing out DDR has pushed Amazon’s pedestal up. There’s no harm trying Amazon, and who knows when will their music selection matches up with iTunes in the future?
