Domain of the Bored

This week, rather than having one free song listed on the front page of the Amazon MP3 Store, they have four free songs listed on their Special Deals page.

Interesting how two of the songs (“100 Days, 100 Nights” and “Holiday Twist”) both sound like they're from the 1960s, but they're actually brand-new from this year. Also interesting how Los Straitjackets (“Holiday Twist”) have now had a free song on both iTunes (“Sleigh Ride”) and Amazon.

(And yes, I know that iTunes link doesn't work. I don't know why; it turns up in the search results.)

If you went to the Amazon MP3 Store on Wednesday and are like me, you stopped scrolling at the free download.

Keep scrolling—I did (just today), and found that there's a second free download this week. Here's the direct download link. Be aware that it's a rap song with some naughty words in it.

Well, this sucks. It's now Tuesday (when all the new music and DVDs come out here in the US), so I just now went to the Amazon MP3 store to see what this week's free song is.

No luck. Just a week after I blogged about it, it looks like Amazon has stopped offering a free song, as there's nothing about it on the front page anymore. And in case you're wondering, last week's free song was there yesterday (I went there yesterday and saw it).

I hope this isn't permanent.

UPDATE 2007-10-17: Woo-hoo! It wasn't. The free song section is back now, and updated with this week's song.

Patience is a virtue, I guess. ☺

It's a bit hard to notice—they don't promote it as obviously as Apple always has—but the Amazon MP3 Store also has a free song of the week. It's the third box down in the left column, and it's titled “Weekly Free Download”.

And, of course, unlike most of Apple's free songs, Amazon's free songs are free in two ways: free of charge, and DRM-free.

They finally started selling something that I want to buy.

Almost since the iTunes Music Store first opened, I've been a customer of the iTunes Store. 99¢ a song is fine by me, and I love paying by the song. There are few albums so consistently good that I'll buy the whole thing.

Then iTunes Plus started, and I immediately switched over. Sure, it's 30¢ extra, but I pay that 30¢ as a statement against DRM.

Then came the Amazon MP3 Store.

Amazon sells plain old MP3s, at roughly 256 kbps VBR (in order that nobody can complain about the encoding quality). Since they're plain old MP3s, there's no DRM.

Even better, Amazon beats iTunes' prices: 89–99¢ per song. iTunes charges $1.29 (remember, no DRM, so the proper comparison is to iTunes Plus rather than to non-Plus).

So, in short:

• The encoding is almost as good as or better than iTunes.
• The price is the same as or less than iTunes.
• Amazon's MP3s are never DRMed, whereas iTunes' MPEG-4s are usually DRMed.

Like Simone, I shall buy from Amazon first from now on. (I haven't switched away from iTunes; they'll continue to get my business for songs that Amazon doesn't carry. But, unfortunately for Apple, I expect that set to diminish.) Take notice of this, Apple—get the record labels to let you lower your prices, or you will lose serious market share to Amazon.

Just in case you're wondering…

The Amazon MP3 Store works by downloading a file in a special format: .amz. This is a document for the Amazon MP3 Downloader application. (In case you're wondering, the contents are some binary data, which may just be ciphertext of some sort, encoded in base64.)

The reason they do this is so that it can download the MP3s into a subfolder of your Music folder, rather than your usual Downloads folder (normally your Desktop). That's good, but it has two downsides:

1. You need a Windows or Mac OS X PC to download MP3s from Amazon, even though the MP3s themselves will play anywhere.
2. If your browser is set not to auto-open files, or doesn't trust the Amazon MP3 Downloader, then you may be sitting there for a moment wondering why the Downloader is not doing anything.

My suggestion to Amazon would be to switch to a custom URL scheme, rather than a custom file format. I don't know about Windows, but this would certainly make it much easier on the Mac, since the custom URL scheme will always work. (It won't help the non-Mac non-Windows users, though, since you still need the Amazon MP3 Downloader to handle the custom URL.)