Amazon Digital Music Store Goes Live

Written by A. L. Friedman

Tuesday, September 25. 2007 at 11:59 AM EDT 4 comments

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Mark September 25 on your calendar. We may very well may celebrate it as the beginning of the end of our national nightmare under the oppressive bondage of the iTunes Music Store.

As I've said before, Amazon is the only player in the game with a real chance at denting Apple's dominance. It already has massive amounts of visitors, many of whom are already shopping for music anyway. It offers high-quality music (256 Kbit/s) at reasonable and, more importantly, variable prices. Albums range from $5.99 to $9.99, with the most popular albums all selling for $8.99. Single tracks are $0.89 or $0.99, but the top 100 tracks at any given time are all $0.89.

And, as promised, the Amazon MP3 Store has no DRM. A side note: All debates about DRM's positive and negative effects aside, the freedom from the iPod-specific FairPlay DRM on which Apple insisted will put more purchased music on more types of MP3 players, many of which Amazon also sells. These dudes are smart!

(An additional jab to Apple: Amazon's press release features a positive quote from KT Tunstall who recently played live at the launch of Apple's new line of iPods. Zing!)

The store itself requires a quick download of the Amazon MP3 Downloader application, but that's standard operating procedure for a number of similar stores. And when the files were finished, the app opened iTunes for me. (I'm now listening to the Hold Steady's Boys and Girls n America, a fine album which I hadn't actually paid for.)

Of course, we won't really know the effect of the Amazon MP3 Store on the market for a few months, but this all looks pretty good so far.

Anybody else out there using it? Thoughts? Problems? Let us know in the comments.