Amazon MP3 Reviewer's Comments

Amazon is making great strides to take over the Internet buying experience, and now they have thrown their hat into the digital music world, offering DRM free MP3 format songs and albums to download, and do with as you please. For less than a dollar, you can own any song in their library and play it on an unlimited number of portable players, including iPod; burn to as many CDs you can find and load onto as many computers that you want. It is music freedom at its best.

Unfortunately, many record labels don’t like the idea of music freedom and Amazon lacks many of the latest artists and titles. 

Amazon MP3 Screenshots. Click for more
       


MP3 Music Selection:  

Although Amazon offers more than two million songs, most are independent artists, small labels, older bands that own all the rights to their music or big names with limited album selection including Pink Floyd, Radiohead, Coldplay, David Bowie, Counting Crows, Eminem, Weezer, the Rolling Stones and more.

In the future, we suspect if Amazon plays its cards right and kisses up to the right people at the major studios, they could potentially oust our #1 service, iTunes. 

Search Capablities:  

Since the music selection is limited, finding exactly what you are looking for can be difficult. Although you can search by artist using the search box their isn’t a filter just for artists. After you search for an artist, Amazon will present you with a list of artists with those keywords in their title. Easy to use, just a little annoying. 

Feature Set*:  

All music downloaded from Amazon is DRM free. Which means there are no secret tracking codes embedded in your music dictating how or where you can use it. This means you can transfer purchased tracks to CDs  and most portable MP3 players like iPod, Creative Zen and Zune.

Although not located on the AmazonMP3 page, the site does have other digital content including movies and television shows through Amazon UnBox. However, UnBox downloads are only compatible with Microsoft Windows and TiVo.  

Download/Setup:  

We didn’t experience any problems using this service. Prices of individual songs are .89 or .99, full albums range from about $5 to $10. To download an entire album you are required to install a small application that will manage your music downloads.

The Amazon MP3 Downloader is a tiny application that is required for purchasing and downloading an entire album and is currently available for Mac and Windows operating systems.
Help/Support:  

Amazon always offers excellent support. They include a getting started guide, FAQs, email and telephone contact. We emailed Amazon with some questions and they got back to us in about two days. However, to submit the email we had to provide an order number, and since we hadn’t ordered anything yet, it proved to be difficult to fake. 

Summary:  

Once Amazon is able to offer more popular artists consistently and expand their collection they will be a serious force to reckon with.