Amazon has three things to offer us as they’re pushing their new alternative to the iTunes Store.
1. Better quality. Better bitrate, better tools, VBR. If you know anything about audio quality, you’ll be pleasantly surprised to hear this huge step forward from the 128kbps bitrate on the iTunes store. Problem is, most iTunes users I know don’t know that their music is encoded at such a low rate, and probably can’t tell. When no problem exists, there’s no problem to solve.
2. No DRM. Songs actually belong to you. This is great if you want to download the song to a non-iPod, or if you want to send them to a friend.
3. Cheaper. This is the one most consumers will understand. The songs are 10 cents cheaper than their DRM counter parts on iTunes, and 40 cents cheaper than the iTunes non-DRM files.
The problem seems to be that, with any new alternative, there needs to be a perceived problem with the current one in order for it to be de-throned by the new one. So, a better quality MP3 will not be enough to switch users from iTunes to Amazon. What about price and no DRM? Maybe.
Amazon doesn’t offer any type of management system for the downloads. There’s an application that acts as a downloader, but it doesn’t actually play the files. People are still going to use iTunes as their player, which means that the 10 cent discount and the DRM-free files come at a cost of having to run a separate program, with a separate user account. It means that the files that are downloaded need to imported into the iTunes library (as opposed to automatically appearing under “Purchased”). It means that the user actually has to deal with the physical file, rather than a line in the iTunes browser (many users don’t see the link between physical files and the the iTunes line item).
So I guess it all depends on how important non-DRM files and 10 cents off matter to the legal music downloaders. I know that I’m going to turn to Amazon for my downloading, but my dad will probably stick to what he knows, and to what interfaces with his iPod the easiest.
Just as a sidenote, I wish there existed a program for Windows that could manage any MP3 playing device that was plugged in.
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