Amazon MP3 Mini-Review
I was a big fan of the Amazon MP3 store when it launched. It has a great selection. It works on any device. There is no DRM. The tracks are high quality. It finally provides competition to iTunes.
So I started talking about it, recommending it to friends and family and bought a few tracks here and there, mostly dropping iTunes Music Store purchases.
Between buying actual CD’s from music stores and from the artists themselves where possible (think Radiohead, NIN, JoCo), I had only made a few purchases from Amazon MP3.
But there are a few problems with the service:
Browsing. Amazon MP3 and other music, kinds of gets lost with the rest of Amazon’s items. If I’m looking for “the Power of 8” by Cloud Cult I don’t want to sift through all items with the terms “Power” and “8” as part of their metadata. In iTunes, the same search gets me exactly what I want in one step.
Download Problems. I have ordered probably 20 or so tracks from the Amazon MP3 store and not had any problems. Today when I was getting ready to order a few things and my first purchase crashed and burned. I never got the AMZ file and the store told me that I had already download it and couldn’t download it again. In contrast, between me, my wife and my son, we’ve probably downloaded around 1,000 tracks in the last few years and never, ever had a single problem. To Amazon’s credit, I called their customer service and they were able to reset my download in less than 3 minutes. Still I had the same problem with one last track I purchased. Instead of calling again, I just found the song out on the Internet.
So, I think I’m done with Amazon. It was a good effort, but not enough. I’ll go back to iTunes for my digital music purchases. ITunes is inferior in many ways to Amazon - but there’s much less friction to its use.
