Enhanced with Minerals for Taste

11 Reasons Why Amazon MP3 is Better than iTunes

Now that the Amazon MP3 Store has music available from all the four major record labels, I can think of no reason I’ll be using the iTunes Music Store ever again.

While I’m always open to listen to a well-researched rebuttal, I think this one is difficult to argue. Even before the Sony BMG announcement, I preferred Amazon’s music service - that announcement was just the nail in the coffin. Without further ado, here are 11 reasons why the Amazon MP3 Store beats the pants off of the iTunes Music Store. Yes, this list goes to eleven.

1. No DRM means that we finally have a way to legally get music from all the major labels without being tied down to a specific music player, platform, software. Music is finally free again - just like it was when we used to make mix tapes from songs we recorded from the radio. Ahh, to be 14 again (really, 14 wasn’t that much fun, but it would be nice to have that kind of time).

2. MP3 Format allows us to play to music in any player and on any device we want. Honestly, I thought .m4a was kind of cute when it first came out - because I have an iPod - it’s not cute. It’s a pain the butt.

3. Price matters. $0.89 < $0.99 ∴ less $ = more ♫

4. Organization and experience seems intuitive with the Amazon store. It seems incredible that Apple, in my view anyway, has been beaten at the game they helped to revolutionize with the iPod . . . an intuitive user interface. Perhaps it’s because folks are so very used to browsing Amazon or maybe it’s simply because Amazon’s commitment to studying how users interact with their site is paying off in spades.

5. It’s Amazon, and it’s familiar to more people. It’s a hard concept for those of us who use computers 8+ hours a day to grasp, but not everybody is comfortable with downloading the 50MB beheamoth that is iTunes. The fact that Amazon is one step closer to the user makes a difference.

6. Search from within the browser (without the need to open another program). It would’ve probably been more accurate if I’d listed this first - this is my number one reason for loving the Amazon MP3 store. I don’t keep iTunes open all the time - my browser on the other hand is, much of the time, the only application running. If I think of or hear a song I want to investigate, I don’t want to open iTunes and search. I want to type the artist, song, or album into my Amazon Quick Search box and get results.

7. Free songs are delivered to my RSS reader every day thanks to a custom feed I created. I can create feeds for any music list that interests me and grab the DRM free goodness at will. It’s probably worth a whole new post just to show all of the things that can be done with xml from the Amazon MP3 store.

8. Earnings from the Mechanical Turk can be used to buy music. HITs from the Mechanical Turk range from $0.01 to many dollars each. If you’re bored and want to take a few minutes, you can earn your music instead of breaking out your credit card. Give it a try!

9. Music recommendations while searching for other products on Amazon are just another way I can find music I might not have discovered otherwise. While I’m not sure everyone likes it, I actually enjoy seeing what Amazon recommends for me - and they’ve gotten quite good at it as the years have gone by. I’m looking forward to having them learn my musical tastes as well.

10. Wishlists allow me to budget my music spending and keep running lists of music I’m considering purchasing. When I come across some music money, I can go to my list for a reminder of what I found interesting a few weeks ago.

11. Jeff Bezos is not a pretentious twit. Listen, I respect Steve Jobs. He’s brilliant. He’s a great leader. His vision is unparalled. I’d like him better, though, if he’d stop acting like a movie star. My blog. My opinion.

Unfortunately, neither store is perfect, and likely neither will be. The biggest downside of both has to be their localization. Folks from Holland, for example, can only download from the Dutch music stores and the folks, like me, in the US have to buy from the US store. That’s a price I’ll pay for freeing the music again though. In all, I’ve not been this excited about my music options since I started dating my wife 10 years ago - and her music collection was about 10-times the size of mine.