Review of Amazon's DRM-Less Music Download Store

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 tried it out today

[crovira]

And it works well.

I purchased "Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict (1994 Digital Remaster)" off of the "Ummagumma" by "Pink Floyd"and got it to update iTunes (and my iPod) without a hitch.

It works and the selection seems to be pretty good.

Re:I tried it out yesterday

[cliffiecee]

I haven't tried it, but I searched for some songs I recently bought with iTunes. Everything I bought was also at Amazon; One album was cheaper by a dollar, some songs were 0.89 rather than 0.99. I wish I'd heard about this earlier!

Magnatune has lossless downloads

[cutecub]

The indy music store/label Magnatune [magnatune.com] has both lossy and lossless music downloads. They're a good example of what's possible:

There are 5 major formats availabe to buyers:

• 44k/16bit WAV: zip file of perfect quality WAV files.
• FLAC: zip file of perfect quality FLAC files.
• OGG: zip file of high quality OGG files.
• 128kb MP3: zip file of 128kb MP3 files.
• MP3 VBR: zip of high quality MP3 VBR files.

-S

Some special software required, sometimes. WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

> No special software needed (making it Linux friendly).

Only for single tracks, not for albums. From both TFA and TFFAQ [amazon.com],

[Q:] Do I need to install the Amazon MP3 Downloader to buy music?

[A:]The Amazon MP3 Downloader application is required for album purchases but is not required for purchasing songs.

WTF? That's a weird restriction.

Linux users can download tracks, but not albums, and Amazon is porting [amazon.com] this "download manager" thingy to Linux.

That immediately rang my spyware warning bell, but the FAQ [amazon.com] page offers one non-evil clue:

[Q:] Why is the availability of some songs and albums different from the CD version?

[A:] Record companies do not always have the rights to sell all the songs on a CD individually. This may be at the request of the artist or due to other contractual reasons. Additionally, digital versions of an album can sometimes contain bonus tracks not available on the CD, and sometimes the CD has tracks not available on the digital version. Record companies control what tracks are made available on specific formats, and Amazon MP3 will offer all tracks made available for sale.

If all the "downloader" does is verify that the licensing requirement of "album downloads entail a download of every track on the album" is met, that's reasonable.

But it's still such a weird and artificial restriction that while spidey-spyware-detector may not have pegged itself into the redline, it's still firmly into the yellow.

This isn't about individually serialized/watermarked files. First off, I've got no problem with serialized MP3s -- we're not supposed to be sharing the files we download from the service in the first place. But if (and that's an if) Amazon's taking the serialization approach, the serials can be embedded just as easily from the server at the time of download.

All of which makes me wonder just what, precisely, this "download manager" actually does. Amazon's making a damn good offer here: the music I want, in the format in which I want it, at a fair dollar price. But this "download manager" needs a wee bit more technical info before I sign up. Not every cost is measurable in dollars.

Record label needs to recoup investment*s*

[AHumbleOpinion]

$8-$9 is too much for an album. It's like they took the distribution costs of a CD, (which could be estimated at $5-$8,) chopped them off, and are still expecting to make the same profit. Why can't they charge much less and make up the profits on volume?

Well the main reason is the consumer's willingness to pay. But record labels also need to recoup their investments and one "successful" artist has to pay for many "unsucceful" artists.

Artists need a label if they desire a certain level of commercial success. It takes a lot of money to promote an artist and bring them to the attention of the mass national or world market. Artists can not afford to do this on the money they making playing in small venues, among their core audience. If they manage to feed themselves they are doing above average, if they can support a family they are so rare they are nearly an anomoly.

The label system persists because there will always be some artists who want large scale success. Of course these successful artists gripe when they think about the small percentage they receive themselves but the truth is they are getting a small percentage of a much larger pie. If you are only getting 5 cents on the dollar, but you are generating several hundred times (or more) the revenue then they are far ahead.. To be faiir to the labels they need a disproportionately large cut from one artist to pay for the dozens of other artists they had *speculatively* financed they did not attain large scale commercial success. Please understand that I am not saying the current label/artist split is correct, I have no way to calculate what the split should be. I am merely arguing that the label system is quite logical and it is economically justifiable for the labels to receive a large percentage due to the speculative nature of their investments.

Artists have almost always needed patrons throughout history. Centuries ago it was the church, royalty, or the wealthy. Today the record label fulfills that role.

Re:Competition is good.

[e2d2]

Seems the current selection is pretty good. I did a check for my favorite artist, Bob Marley, and where some places only stock a few albums of his they have 66 albums. That means tons of live albums and other fairly obscure stuff. Bob is a pretty popular artist, but I dare anyone to walk into a Sam Goodies or HMV and find a copy of Boston '76 (live).

But I fully agree, I really hope the record industry takes note and realizes that people actually will pay to download DRM-free music, it's profitable. That's what's gonna matter to these guys. When they realize they can sell the same album with NO media costs they'll jump (like they are selling ringtones!).

 

Rather than mod you as a troll...

[Overzeetop]

...I'll respond.

I can't tell the difference between a 256kb MP3 and a FLAC. I've done the ABX, and my threshold on good equipment is somewhere in the 224 range, give or take a bit depending on the program. That said, I can usually tell the difference between a 256mp3->128kbmp4 and a FLAC->128kbmp4. Bad experience with past formats made me re-rip my entire collection to FLAC. Those are my "masters" and I recode to the format-of-the-hour (on the fly to my portable with media monkey) for use on the road.

I like the Amazon store, and I'm pretty likely to use it. I'd be happier if they offered FLAC. Hell, any uncompressed would be okay, since I'd just transcode to FLAC, but getting it native would be nice.

Album vs. single tracks

[Kelson]

It seems to me that if the only issue is whether tracks are licensed for individual sale or not, they could probably solve that by offering the album as, say, a ZIP archive containing the album tracks. If a track is only available on an album, and not individually, then you only put it in the ZIP.

Heck, for all we know, maybe an .amz file [amazon.com] is just a zip archive, just with a different extension so that it'll open with the Amazon Downloader and automatically extract itself.

Re:AAC "quality" irrelevant ...

[pthisis]

More importantly the improved "quality" of 256 kb AAC over 256kb MP3 is largely hypothetical, few if any could tell the difference.

There are sites out there offering decent rewards (in the thousands of US$) to anyone able to tell the difference between 256kb MP3 and uncompressed audio in double-blind A/B tests (of course there are specifications on which version of LAME and options are used for the encoding). I just googled around and couldn't find the links, sadly; I'll see if I can dig it up later.

On a somewhat related note, the most recent edition of the Audio Engineering Society's journal [aes.org] includes the interesting study"Audibility of a CD-Standard A/D/A Loop Inserted into High-Resolution Audio Playback", E. BRAD MEYER AND DAVID R. MORAN, J. Audio Eng. Soc., Vol. 55, No. 9, 2007. It pretty conclusively demonstrated that 16/44 (normal CD quality) and 24/96 (Super Audio CD/HDCD quality) raw audio are also essentially indistinguishable (using a long-term double-blind testing with hundreds of trials including college students, subscribers and editors of a well-known audiophile magazine, and professional mastering engineers). It notably included long-duration testing as well--not just the typical "listen for a few minutes to A, then a few minutes of B and try to distinguish". It was possible for some listeners to pick up differences under extreme conditions (scaling up the audio and jacking up the decibel levels), but not under normal "listening to it played normally on high-end audio equipment" conditions.

That's not to say that your SACD collection is worthless, but it's the care that goes into mastering products aimed at an audiophile market rather than the extra bits that might make it sound better (meaning that it's unlikely to be any better than that well-done Mobile Fidelity or whoever "audiophile" mastering of a standard CD, unless better mastering sources are found or something like that).

Re:MP3 sounds bad to my ears

[afay]

The question is not whether you can distinguish one from the other. Anyone can do that. The question is, if you're not told beforehand (blind), can you pick out the higher quality recording more than 50% of the time. And the answer is you can't.

"Love it!" and How to increase sales

[jgoemat]

This is what I've been waiting for, I bought over 160 songs last night... The experience is great, one click will buy and import into iTunes just like apple. The 30 second previews load in just a couple of seconds. The music for the most part is cheaper than Apple. I got a couple of double-CD sets for under $10. I think this is one reason Universal is snubbing Apple, they wanted some control over song pricing and Apple only allows the flat 99 cent rate ($1.29 for the non-DRM songs). Some songs are more expensive on Amazon, I think I saw a few that were $1.99, but most are only 89 cents.

I love previewing the songs, what would be perfect is if Amazon had radio stations to play the song previews. I could sit all day and just listen to the previews to find new music. I spent four hours yesterday looking for music. If it was just playing in the background all day I could open my browser and buy a song when I heard one I liked...

Re:MP3 sounds bad to my ears

[pthisis]

It's not "elitist fuckery", it's a combination of good equipment, an original source recording of high quality, and perhaps better-than-average hearing.

Every actual study I've seen shows that except on certain "hard" classes of recordings it's wishful thinking or other psychology--with 99% of normal music (be it well-recorded classical, a capella voice, rock, whatever) the 256kbps VBR LAME settings Amazon uses haven't been distinguishable to anyone in any scientific study I'm aware of.

I've had this argument many times, and there are some recordings that reveal obvious flaws in even 320 kbps CBR mp3 to my ears with my headphones and amplifier

If you can do it regularly, then you should pretty easily be able to make thousands of dollars for a few hour's work by claiming any of the numerous prizes offered for people who can succesfully distinguish 256kbps VBR MP3 of a wide array of popular music from uncompressed originals in a double-blind A/B test.

Now, if you're just talking a handful of special-case horrible-for-mp3 recordings (like, say, the well-known Eig [hydrogenaudio.org] "LAME killer" sample) then that's another story; some people can certainly pick that one out at 320 kbps VBR.

You can easily start off using a free ABX program like PC ABX [pcabx.com] (Windows) or LinABX [beryllium.net], or a more expensive hardware solution. Just see if you can actually ABX them at home and if so, you should be good to go claim some cash.

It's pretty fun to see what you can actually distinguish, too. I have a nice setup with a good pair of Grados; out of my library of 4000+ songs there are maybe 3-4 I've found so far that I can pick out a 192kbps Ogg from FLAC. Before doing such testing, I was "sure" I could pick out the difference between the original and the 320kbps encodings I usually make. Most people who come over to my place can't distinguish 96 kbps from uncompressed except on a handful of nasty test samples, but if you actually learn what the common artifacts are it gets a bit easier for some people.

Will lead to higher prices

[csha]

Seriously people, the truth is that this is too good to be true. It's a short term solution for the record companies to take pricing power away from Apple. All they had to do was do everything Apple wanted them to do but with Amazon, who doesn't have the pull to make long term contracts for specific pricing. Now everyone's jumping out of iTunes and the record companies have bargaining power that will allow them to charge whatever the hell they want to. I know that the prices are all lower now, but it's just the introductory rate and they are sure to go up given time. Hell, gain enough power back in the online music industry and they can even slip DRM back in. That leaves us with an end game of higher priced music heavily controlled by the record companies.

Also, for those saying competition here is a good thing, remember that these distributors are running at extremely low margins. What they are basically doing is competing against each other for how much the record companies will give them out of the profits. They aren't competing for the consumer's money so much as for the record companies' money. All this does is give the record companies the power that normal competition should give the consumer.

Re:MP3 sounds bad to my ears

[seanpark]

You've used my ears?

Impressive.

Give me each signal on a mixer with the song playing in sync and a nice pair of headphones. With many recordings, I will be able to tell.

I really don't get this. I didn't state any universal absolute, and a bunch of people got on my ass (I'm the grandparent). If I had said "MP3 sounds bad," your posts and this argument would be valid. But there is no disputing matters of taste and I said to my ears.

I have more discriminating taste than many, yes. That doesn't make me or anyone else wrong. I train my ear to recognize subtle differences in sounds--I'm a musician. Most of you probably don't. Most of you probably couldn't tell Just Intonation from Equal Temperament. I can. You could too, if you trained your ears. I have.

Stop treating legitimate comments and concerns like flamebait.

Re:Obligitory

[Glonoinha]

None of my theoretical pirated .MP3s gave me a motherfucking root-kit.
I say theoretical, of course, because I don't pirate music. But if I did, they wouldn't.

Plenty of Sony 'compact discs bought at retail' are guaranteed to give you a root-kit.
And that technology was in use two years ago - I can only imagine what they are putting on retail CDs now.

Re:Classical selection...

[Petrushka]

I doubt they'll ever get around to normalising the pricing, actually. Amazon has never had reliable information about classical recordings -- sometimes their metadata lists title-plus-composer, sometimes title-plus-performer, sometimes just title, and to find out e.g. who the conductor is you have to look at the scanned images of the CD booklet (as with the Prokofiev symphonies, for example) -- but those don't always give full information either. Amazon's always had similar problems with translated books (they give details of the translator only erratically). I would venture a guess that these peculiarities are here to stay. Unless, say, Naxos pipes up and starts complaining about how suddenly their recordings are the most expensive on the market.