Review of Amazon's DRM-Less Music Download Store 437
fdmendez writes to tell us that he had a chance to check out Amazon's DRM-less music download store that was recently released as a beta trial. "Amazon one-ups the iTunes store in every way except for popularity. Never once did I find an album to be more expensive on the Amazon store in comparison to the iTunes store. The download experience was pleasant, and the lack of DRM truly makes it YOUR music. I don't know of any other download service that could top the Amazon MP3 store."
I do... (Score:5, Insightful)
AllOfMP3.
MP3, empeeshmee (Score:1, Insightful)
Any that sell FLAC [sourceforge.net] for a start!
Competition is good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Obligitory (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean the service where everybody leeches, resulting in complete lack of bandwidth available to downloaders unless you're in an exclusive, ratio-metered club?
Or the one that really only works for popular albums, as anything old or otherwise unpopular and non-mainstream will have no seeders?
Even accounting for the $0 price tag, Bittorrent has a LONG way to go to rival ANY paid music store.
It's too good (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I do... (Score:5, Insightful)
"in every way" (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Obligitory (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I do... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:"in every way" (Score:3, Insightful)
But, at that bit rate, can you honestly say you can tell the difference with your own ears?
Re:"in every way" (Score:4, Insightful)
AAC "quality" irrelevant ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't that 256kb AAC the optional higher priced version?
More importantly the improved "quality" of 256 kb AAC over 256kb MP3 is largely hypothetical, few if any could tell the difference. However even if we accept marginal quality and size improvements these are overwhelmingly outweighed by the universal nature of MP3 files. Every digital player supports MP3. Portables, cars, home stereos, etc. There is no vendor lock.
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I do... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's like settling for a JPG of the Mona Lisa.
Re:Not exactly DRM free (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:I tried it out yesterday (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:AAC "quality" irrelevant ... (Score:2, Insightful)
We are comparing Amazon's MP3 downloads to Apple's AAC downloads, Apple's AAC's have DRM. The fact that you can rip your CD to AAC is largely irrelevant. Most folks I know reconfigure iTunes to rip as MP3 rather than the default AAC, exceptions are die hard long term Mac owners.
In addition to the preceding, "vendor lock" does not require a technological enforcement. Simple market forces where only one vendor says a particular format is of interest counts too, as is the current situation.
AllOfMp3 (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:BZZZZT (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I tried it out yesterday (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I do... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:AAC "quality" irrelevant ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Not the 256 kbps ones he's talking about; they're DRM-free
Re:I do... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not like settling for a jpg of the Mona Lisa. It's like buying just the Mona Lisa jpg instead of a collection of artwork that includes the Mona Lisa. Maybe the rest of that artwork is crap.
Back to the album...maybe you don't want to go through the trouble of converting it yourself. Maybe you don't want to mess with CDs at all. There are plenty of reasons why it's a better choice to buy a single off an album rather than the entire album.
Re:AAC "quality" irrelevant ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Except when they don't. The higher-bitrate iTunes Plus songs are DRM-free AAC.
As for quality, I did my own listening tests between 192Kbps MP3 and 128Kbps AAC when Apple first added support for AAC, and I could clearly hear a difference (using iTunes encoding, maybe it was their ripper). To my ears AAC sounds much better than MP3. Others' ears may hear differently. If nothing else I get comparable audio quality. Don't fear the AAC.
What about backups? (Score:2, Insightful)
Time = Money (Score:5, Insightful)
So while I agree that you end up paying more for less (no album cover, no liner notes, no physical media) it comes close to being a wash (not quite) with the immediacy and the convenience.
Re:$8-$9 is too much (Score:4, Insightful)
"Why can't they charge much less and make up the profits on volume?"
Well, first -- if by "they" you mean Amazon, my highly educated guess is that Amazon is making 15 points on the sale. They don't have much room to move.
Many people tend to put too much faith in unit elasticity: if you cut the price of oranges in half, you'll sell twice as many; double the price and you'll sell half as many. The real world seldom works that way, so lots of research is done on pricing theory. My industry (computer peripherals) does it, countless others do it, and it's a safe assumption that record labels and Amazon do it, too -- despite the fact that every Slashdotter just knows that music is overpriced and sold at obscene profits.
Putting costs of production aside (assuming that they have the ability to sell at any price and make a profit), it might simply be that they do not believe that they will double their sales if they sell albums at $4 rather than $8. I know it certainly wouldn't be the case in my situation; I would not spend appreciably more on music if prices were lowered. I buy all the music I could possibly want on iTunes (and I'll soon be trying Amazon). My interest runs out before my budget does. And, as nonsensical as this might seem, there are millions of other consumers just like me.
When you step closer to the real world and take into account the costs of sale, elasticity becomes even more of an issue. If (say) that album has a cost of sale of $3.90, then they'll make a dime per sale at $4, or $4.10 per sale at $8. So even if they double their sales by cutting the price in half, their net revenue would still drop by 95%. In this scenario, sales would need to increase by about 20X to make the same amount of money, and that's very unlikely to happen.
Re:Say what? (Score:4, Insightful)
As one who has never used a subscription service (I'm one of the low-volume types) I ask this: if your subscription ceases, do you still have access to the music you already downloaded?
Re:I do... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's legal to download music because it's legal, not because of the blank media levy. Whether or not the industry is bilking you of that money, you have that right. It's not illegal. The media levy doesn't make it any more or less legal, though it may assuage some of the guilt people feel.
If you put a levy on bullets to ease the pain and suffering of families that are broken apart by gun violence, it doesn't make shooting people legal. It's an illegal activity no matter what.
The levy is a smoke screen so that we don't notice if they try and legislate our IP rights away. It's a random and immoral money grab. It presupposes guilt when you buy media for any purpose, even if the media has non-infringing purposes. We should all hate the levy.
Re:Obligitory (Score:4, Insightful)
Albums vs singles (Score:3, Insightful)
Not always. Sometimes an album is an integrated 'experience' that doesn't work as singles at all, sometimes the singles can stand alone but make more sense listened to on the album and some 'albums' are just some random unrelated songs sold as a bundle. It really just depends on the artist. Please avoid making sweeping generalizations.
All recording artists are not Pink Floyd. And even though I like a lot of Pink Floyd I still think it is good that not all music comes in such inseperable slabs.
Re:I do... (Score:4, Insightful)
But that has nothing to do with what I enjoy. They dont get to tell me how I have to enjoy their music.
And I cant think of a single album, ever, where I've ever wanted to listen to it all, end-to-end, or even give a rat's hairy butt about listening to them in context with each other.
In every cases, I'd prefer to listen to 1, maybe 2 (in exceptional cases) songs from an artist, then I want something different. Listening to the same singer/artist over and over again just bores me.
Re:Obligitory (Score:3, Insightful)