Amazon MP3 Takes on the iTunes Store

johnbaxterlists (apparently) - 04:33pm Sep 28, 2007 PST
via email

I've visited Amazon's new store but not (yet) bought anything.

That said...

1. The listening quality, as between iTunes Plus' encoding and
Amazon's, probably depends more on the quality of the source from
which the music was encoded than on the encoding form (AAC or higher-
bit-rate MP3). There's probably no way for most of us to tell,
barring use of a really bad source by one store or the other*. (The
musicians here will have to guide me, and probably many of us--but if
I can't hear the difference it doesn't matter to me. I don't listen
for 18 hours a day as some seem to, so extra fatigue due to
inaudible--to me--differences wouldn't matter to me either.)

*And since the music companies seem to be trying to take iTunes store
down a notch, the last thing they would do is supply Amazon with
lesser source than they've supplied to Apple--perhaps better source,
though.

2. What portable player is the music likely to be played on?
Players people have (also known as iPods). Even if paid download
market share evens out between Amazon and Apple (and I wouldn't want
to be anyone else except a niche player at this point), that's good
for iPod sales as long as Apple makes the iPod attractive. I know
Windows users less than delighted with iTunes the application*--the
Amazon download application frees them from the need for iTunes (as I
understand it). So long as there exists a non- iTunes Windows program which can load MP3 music onto iPods, that is...

Apple may have to be a little more careful about keeping iPod the
attractive "in" thing now. In the long run it may hurt Apple, but
"in the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)

*One reason is that as shipped, the accompanying QuickTime loads at
startup, bothering those who care about minimizing that sort of
thing. It doesn't NEED to load at startup: things work fine if the
loading is deferred until first need (good old msconfig is one way to
stop it).

3. How will we know it's a success? One way would be watching
Microsoft to see whether MS decides it's better to direct sales to
Amazon than to make them itself (with or without kickback).

4. Those of the most recent MacBreak Weekly panel who have affiliate
relationships with Amazon say that yes, the payments from Amazon work
with referrals to the music download store. That certainly won't
hurt the store's early success. And they say that those
relationships are easier to set up and generally "better" then
Apple's equivalent--with the direct competition in music download
sales, Apple may have to fix their program, which would be good for
many out here. (I don't know--I'm not a player in the space.)

   --John