I was looking for a game show theme song last night for a personal thing I’m working on (more on that next week). I needed to be able to convert to other formats, so the iTunes Store was a no go (they didn’t have it in the DRM-free iTunes Plus format).
So I decided to give AmazonMP3 Store a try, since all the music they sell is unprotected, plain MP3.
Overall the experience was very good. You browse the (limited, I hear) selection and preview the songs all through your web browser. I use Amazon a lot so I know my way around well.
Then, the first time you buy something, it makes you download a little application that handles your purchases (see image). This program is available for Mac and is surprisingly simple, Mac-like and works as advertised.
My song got downloaded and added to my iTunes library in seconds. I was pleasantly surprised by the whole experience and can see myself shopping there often. The track I bought sounds like one of those demos that come with your $30 Casio keyboard we all had when we were 10, but that’s a different story (and is the original album’s fault, not the MP3 format).
I tried the amazon mp3 store about a month ago to buy Year Zero from NIN and my overall experience was very good too. Having to download the little application is ok, but what I didn’t liked is that the downloaded songs are copied to a folder called ‘Amazon MP3’ that is located under your user\Music folder. You can change that in the Preferences, but I think the application should ask you: ‘Where is you music library?’ the first time you use it instead of having that default folder.