Amazon has thrown their hat into the digital music world and lands our TopTenREVIEWS Bronze Award, 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.
To search for artists or albums, you simply use the search box. Everything we typed in produced relevant results, even when we spelled names incorrectly.
You can also browse by album price, genre and popularity in the left navigation or on the homepage. In the future, we would like to see the search box include the capacity to narrow searches by artist, album or genre. After you search for an artist, song or album, Amazon will present you with a list of artists with those keywords in their titles. It’s really easy to use, but just a little annoying if you end up having to scroll through large lists of songs.
All music downloaded from Amazon is DRM free. This means there are no secret tracking codes embedded in your music dictating how or where you can use it. You can transfer purchased tracks to CDs and all portable MP3 players like iPod, Creative Zen, Zune and more. All tracks are encoded at a 256 bit rate.
Though not located on the AmazonMP3 page, Amazon does have other digital content including movies and television shows through Videos on Demand, Amazon Shorts and Game Downloads. However, Video on Demand is only compatible with Microsoft Windows, TiVo and Microsoft PlaysForSure portable devices like Creative Zen and SanDisk; Video on Demand will not work with Mac or iPod.
We didn’t experience any problems using this service. Amazon is a reliable, well-known company that excels in almost everything they do.
Like most music download services, you need to have an account with Amazon to download songs. Registration is free and works for all facets of Amazon’s site. Prices of individual songs are $.79,$.89 or $.99 and albums range from about $5 to $10 with most hovering in the $8.99 range. We found price to reflect popularity and demand. To download an entire album, you are required to install a small application that will manage your music downloads. This application is not required for individual track downloads, but is recommended, especially if you are downloading multiple songs.
The Amazon MP3 Downloader application is compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems. If you decide not to use the Amazon Downloader, you can default your songs to save to iTunes or Windows Media Player.
We would like to point out that Amazon MP3 is only available in the United States. Customers can only purchase tracks with a credit card issued by an American bank with a state-side address.
Amazon always offers excellent support. They include a getting started guide, FAQs, a troubleshooting guide and a how-to section.
You can contact Amazon through email and telephone. 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, we had to fake a ticket.
Although Amazon’s library is a little smaller than iTunes' and Napster's , it is a great place to start your music download search. They are getting new music everyday and have the clout to become a huge player in the digital download universe. As their collection grows, they will become a serious force to reckon with.
For a fun and exciting way to put your music downloads to use, be sure and check out our DJ Software review site.
