The “TopTenREVIEWS Bronze Award” winning music download service is making great strides to take over the Internet buying experience. Now, Amazon has thrown their hat into the digital music world, offering DRM-Free (digital rights management) MP3 formatted songs and albums for you 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. This is music freedom at its best.
Amazon MP3 was the first music download company to sign deals with all four major music labels. They were also the first to encode tracks at 256 kbps, a trend that was quickly followed by its competitors, including the top two music download services, iTunes and Napster.
Amazon also strives to break out of the $.99 mold, offering some tracks for $.89 or $.79. And we were hard pressed to find an album priced higher than $8.99.
Fairly new to the music download scene, Amazon MP3 was able to achieve the impossible, sign a DRM-Free MP3 contract with all four major music labels. Their current library consists of more than 6 million tracks and hundreds of artists.
Admittedly, Amazon MP3’s DRM concept hasn’t warmed up to everyone and the store is still missing some contributions from a few big names. It is quite common to find newer albums by current artists or older albums from bands that own the rights to their music. At first it was difficult to find complete artist collections on AmazonMP3, but as the service grows you'll find more complete choices.
In the future, we suspect if Amazon plays its cards right and kisses up to the right studio executives, they could potentially oust our #1 service, iTunes.
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