Amazon Doing Great Things
The Amazon MP3 music store opened yesterday.It’s a brilliant piece of Beta work, with lots of things going for it. It carries two million songs, or about a third of what iTunes does. But it’s at twice the bit rate and completely DRM free. That means you can burn it, copy it to your other computer, and load it up on iTunes and your iPod. It is MP3 instead of AAC, but I’m pretty sure the 2x bit rate will make up for that. I haven’t tested that myself, yet.
The experience is very smooth. Amazon makes searching around fairly easy. It takes more work than the iTunes Music Store, for sure, but it’s easy enough to handle. On certain artists that it doesn’t have yet, there’s this pleasant message:
Fair enough. Not all artists have that warning — Fastball didn’t when I looked them up — but there’s one simple way to tell when an artist isn’t present in the store: The first dozen songs available for download are karaoke tracks. I wonder if that 2,000,000 number isn’t padded by that.
I tested out downloading with Nellie McKay’s new album, “Obligatory Villagers,” that “dropped” the same day as the music store. Sure enough, Amazon stocked it. With one click, you can order the entire album for $8.91, or individual songs for 99 cents. That’s right — cheaper than iTunes. (We’ll come back to that a little later.)
You download a small unobtrusive program to help automate the download of the files. It looks very Mac-ish to me, and it does the trick. It downloads the files and automatically adds them to your iTunes catalog, complete with cover art. This is impressive work. Saving just that one step from the user is a big plus.
But here’s the thing: While it’s a nice shopping and user experience from Amazon, it shouldn’t be taken as a condemnation for everything Apple is doing wrong. This amazing store is not the result of Amazon hustle, but rather of a music industry wanting to spite Apple. I can’t imagine the RIAA is making more money off cheaper music tracks at Amazon in the long haul. Perhaps Amazon gave them a sweetheart deal to get this thing launched, but the RIAA will be dictating new prices and rights in just a few months. I guarantee it.
I think the lesson Apple needs to learn is one of variable pricing. It’s already there on album prices and for DRM-free music. Now it’s time for Apple to go all the way and differentiate the prices on catalog albums from current songs. It’s not confusing for the consumer to look at the price they’re going to pay before they download something. Apple needs to get over that hang up of theirs. Maybe then they can curry some of that recording industry favor back. Because right now, they need it. This set up at Amazon is a true threat to iTunes. The shopping experience is not that much lesser. The price is right. The interoperability is right. For as long as the RIAA lets Amazon continue on this path, I’ll be shopping as much at Amazon as possible.
But I don’t believe it’ll last forever. Eventually, the bloom will fade and the RIAA will get greedy and start stabbing this cash cow in the back, too. And someone new will fall for the same old charade. I’d just hate to lose the iTunes Store in the process.
The only big strike Amazon has going against it is in the selection of music available. It’s a good chunk of music, but I still had a hard time finding a lot of the music that’s already in my collection, or that I’d be interested in. On the other hand, Dee Cartsensen’s complete catalog is in there, and I’m missing a couple of those albums. . .
Go buy stuff on Amazon. (Click on one of the Amazon banners adorning this blog to get there, of course.) It’s a great deal, an easy deal, and a well-deserved one. For as long as it lasts, we might as well enjoy it.