KEY POINTS:
I just downloaded my first song from Amazon.com's new music store - it was Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb and it cost me US89c (NZ$1.20).
The same track (which is 11.3MB in size, encoded at 244kbps) from the New Zealand Apple iTunes store would have cost me $1.79 and come with Apple's digital rights management (DRM) built into it, limiting how I could play back the track.
Amazon's MP3 files have no DRM. That means you can play the songs on any device, burn them to disc, shuffle them around as you please.
That combined with the fact that the store has a large collection of tracks and employs Amazon's intuitive relational database technology to turn up the sort of content you want to see, makes it the clear new leader in the field. I won't be using the iTunes store any more, unless I can't find the artist on Amazon.
While the iTunes-iPod combo is still pretty powerful, Apple is going to have to work hard to stop an exodus of users to Amazon. That seems to be the consensus among early reviewers of the new service anyway - Salon, the Motley Fool, and Wired all have something to say on the matter.
The Amazon store asked me to download a small application which I wasn't too happy about but soon came to appreciate it as the software queued up the song, showed me the download progress and automatically sent the track to my iTunes player.
It was all very simple, though if you're wary about third party applications, you can do without it for single track downloads, though not full-length albums.
I'm a big user of iTunes but mainly because it's great for subscribing to podcasts. I seldom buy music there, but I'll definitely be buying through Amazon which has around two million DRM-free tunes on offer. Amazon's system of offering up similar content to what you've been searching for has introduced me to all kinds of different music and kept me surfing the website for hours at a time.
The local tech blogosphere:
Aardvark on importing gadgets.
