Amazon goes MP3

Amazon has, at long last, unveiled its MP3 music store in competition with iTunes and the others. Its music is in MP3 format, meaning (1) it's DRM-free, so you can play it on any music player, burn it on CDs, etc.; and (2) it's lower-quality recording than you'd get from iTunes (or directly off a CD), which matters a lot more for choral music than it does for the latest head-banger from Green Day.

They're using the same per-song and per-album pricing scheme that Apple uses, which doesn't work very well for classical music, which wasn't often written with songs and albums in mind. Nonetheless, they seem to have a pretty substantial library of choral music; searching for the keyword "choir" brings up 16,709 tracks, all of which (as far as I could tell with a cursory inspection) seem to be bona fide choral music. They also have a similar confusion as iTunes with the designation "artist," which sometimes means the composer and sometimes the performer, which like the term "song" is borrowed from the pop-music genre.

In the interest of journalistic research, I bought the identical track from both iTunes (using their "protected AAC" format) and from Amazon's MP3 store. The track: "Zadok the Priest," performed by what Amazon calls "Cambridge The Choir of King's College." The difference is noticeable when you listen to them side by side (it's much easier to tell the instruments apart in the AAC version), but admittedly this wasn't a particularly good recording to start with: the voices are pretty mushy, and there's a lot of hiss.

So I tried it again with another track: the Kyrie from Frank Martin's Mass for Double Choir, performed by the Christ Church Cathedral Choir. Better recording, and the difference in quality is more noticeable.

Plus, Apple offers better options for purchasing, since their business model isn't based on selling books. For one thing, you can use a PayPal account, which is much more sensible for small purchases (such as 99c) than a credit card. Apple also aggregates your purchases And of course Apple offers the purchasing and the playing in the same application; to their credit, though, Amazon does have a little application which automatically loads any music you download into iTunes or Windows Media Player. Bottom line, though: they're the same price (except for a handful of 89c tracks on Amazon) for lower quality; not going to be a serious competitor to iTunes in the near future.