Review: Amazon.com ’s MP3 Store
After avoiding ITunes due to their resource heavy windows program and lame DRM that won’t let me move it onto my MP3 player unless it’s an Ipod - I was very happy to see a similar service pop up without all that crap. It was almost too easy to buy MP3’s from Amazon.com and Im going to have to figure out a way to protect myself from spending way too much cash doing so. Its simple and to the point: Find the song you want, pay and save it on your harddrive.
Upsides:
No Subscription: This makes it different from e-music, rhapsody, and whatever else you can think of just about.
Cheap: Albums are anywhere from $7.49 - $9.99 while individual songs are 89 and 99 cents. This is about the same as ITunes.
DRM Free: This is the biggest selling point to me! Once you download the song it’s yours. Now you aren’t supposed to go sharing it with your thousands of friends on limewire but you can burn it to a CD, put it on your mp3 player or play it off of your computer.
Music Suggestions: If you shop at amazon.com you know that they give you recomendations based on what you look at. They do the same thing with their mp3 store which may be a cool way to check out music you wouldn’t have found otherwise. After only searching for two bands it gave me the following:
Downsides:
Songs Available: When you search, just about every band comes up but for some artists there are holes in the albums or songs available. I searched Throwdown, and their latest album shows up but I couldn’t find Vendetta. I also did a search for Soundgarden and tons of songs came up but not the one I was looking for.
Amazon “Downloader”: You don’t have to have this to download mp3’s but it sure does push it on you. It’s used to help you get the songs into ITunes or window’s media player. I can’t imagine why you would need to install something to do that. Luckily its optional - just say ‘no thanks’ when it prompts you.
So How does it work?
When you search for song’s and find one you’d like to buy you just click the “buy mp3″ button and get sent to the screen to either log in or make an amazon.com account. Before you can “check out” you have to agree to their terms of use ( right here) which states the basic things like you promise not to put it online or sell it. You also have to choose whether or not to install their downloader (dont) . After that you are home free - right click and save into your mp3 folder! It honestly took me less than 30 seconds. Considering that I already have an amazon account so they had my billing info, Im guessing you’re looking at a minute or minute and a half if you start from scratch.
I highly recommend this service - its user friendly and has some nice features. Hopefully their music catalog only grows since that is the only thing holding them back.
Bonus: you can use pepsi points to get MP3s - I mean, at least I get something for willingly rotting the teeth out of my head.
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