Buying Digital Music
Written on November 28, 2007
So I just got my iPod Touch (i know, i know…but I’m on a budget given the whole start up thing) and wanted to christen it with some new music. I decided to check out a few of the newer music services in lieu of iTunes to see if Steve Jobs had anything to worry about. Specifically I tried both AmazonMP3 & Lala.com. In short: I think he does.
Let’s start with cost of an album.
I decided to buy (and am currently listening to) the “new” Kanye West album. Okay, it has been out for 3 months….anyhow, here were the prices for the album:
- Amazon: 7.99 (explicit) & 8.99 (clean)
- Lala: 11.69 (explicit & clean)
- iTunes: 11.99 (explicit & clean)
I have no clue why Amazon has different prices for clean vs. explicit but I’ll take the savings either way and buy a cup of Philz!
Next up, how easy is it to get da music on to da Touch.
I didn’t think anything could touch iTunes here, but was thinking Lala.com’s web sync would be a killer feature to enable me to change music while on the go as I don’t keep all of my music on my laptop because of hard drive space. I downloaded the Lala Sync client, but all it did was put another icon in my system tray. Every time I clicked the sync button on the Lala site I’d get a message that there was no ipod connected. I tripled checked and tried with iTunes running and with it turned off. Bummer man!
However, it turns out Amazon did a pretty nifty job here. They have a tiny app / installer that didn’t force me to close all of my browsers like Lala did. Also, they have a nice file extension hack…their app registers to handle .amz files so when you download / open the music file their app gets called without any browser specific plugin code. The app automatically places the music in “My Music / Amazon MP3″ and auto adds it to iTunes Library or WMP (defaults to iTunes if it is installed…smart). My only ding for them is that while downloading an album they show a little system tray notifier that over communicates status with no options to turn it off. ANNOYING! On the plus, it looks like their system tray app closes itself after doing its work + a timeout…nice!
Finally, the little stuff that I noticed when trying to do the same thing on these different services:
- When looking at iTunes version of the album I had no clue if the download was DRMed or not.
- Amazon does not have a link to the MP3 store off its homepage…I got to it by searching for a CD and then clicking a promotional link to the MP3 store.
- I was hoping more of the music on Lala.com had full song preview by now after reading about Lala in Wired.
Overall, high marks to Amazon’s experience…especially given it is a beta. I’ll be checking them first for purchases from now on! Anywhere else I should check out for buying digital music?
Filed in: Uncategorized.
I’m not sure if you know Trevin, but he gave some pretty high marks to the new Zune experience:
http://trevinchow.com/blog/2007/11/26/new-zune-software-impresses/
Not having any Windows computers, this isn’t really an option for me, but it was cool to hear how far it has come. I wouldn’t mind a little shakeup in the MP3 landscape.
Have you played around with:
http://www.seeqpod.com/music/
Wonder how it works on your new toy…
Best
Chris
tom - trevin is a great guy…lots of folks are saying good things about the new zune and before I left the ’soft j allard (zune vp) showed me them - increadible strides since v1. I haven’t played with the software or final device, but I did like the form factor of the 8 gig zune over the form factor of the new fat 8 gig ipod nanos. That said, the touch for videos, browsering, and of course music is unique and doesn’t really have an zune competitor. I’m sure that will change and if msft continues to execute that will change up the hardware landscape as well - makes me think I’ll hold off on buying any apple stock for now.
chris - i just tried seeqpod on the touch…streamed music like a charm. There are several seeqpod like services out there: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/28/music-search-engines-tread-fine-legal-line/. i wonder if there is an opportunity to do this in a more legal maner by just making a killer music search vertical that had tuned relevance + deep index of rich music content (ratings, reviews, editorial, etc). ilike’s search isn’t all that impressive and I off the top of my head I don’t know of an imdb for music.
[...] $8.99 on Amazon [...]
But this Amazon is available only for Us..
FYI, you can turn off the balloon tips by going to the Amazon MP3 downloader preferences.
As for other places, check out Amie Street who are working on a dynamic pricing model and Spiral Frog who are doing an advertising based subscription service.
dario - hopefully that’ll get fixed for the world soon!
kevin - can you add the option to “not be annoying but tell me when my music is all downloaded and availible” into the options screen? thanks.
Ok… I’ll see what I can do. I turned off the baloons myself, I wasn’t a fan of seeing every song pop up either.