ContentSeptember 25th, 2007 by DeWitt Clinton
I’ve been writing reviews on online music stores for years, particularly those that support independent artists and DRM-free downloads.
And hands-down, Amazon’s new store is the best out there. Period.
Some highlights:
- Selection: They say they’ve encoded over 2 million songs so far, and a spot check indicates that the coverage is amazing.
- Quality: 256 kbps MP3. To my ears, this is indistinguishable from uncompressed audio.
- Rights: Every song is DRM free. Seriously.
- Preview: They’re using a gorgeous inline flash player to allow you to preview songs, albums, and playlists.
- Recommendations: Powered by the Amazon personalization engine, it makes eerily good recommendations based on past searches and purchases.
- Reviews: No retail site has a better community of reviewers than Amazon. With this launch, expect to the community to grow even more around album, artist, and song reviews.
- Browse: Just as good as their catalog browsing, optimized for the music buying (and previewing) experience.
- Search: The best-in-class product search engine, applied to the rich metadata of music. (A shout-out to my friends at A9 in Palo Alto!)
I’ll write a full review comparing it to other stores shortly. I’m already blown away.
(Obligatory disclosure, I’m an former employee of Amazon and continue to hold stock in the company. Pretty happy about that today, actually.)
September 25th, 2007 at 8:53 am
Oh wow, their coverage is pretty amazing. My spot check says they’ve got both Mika Bomb albums, and a giant pile of World/Inferno Friendship Society. That’s impressive. No Nervous Cabaret or Tramp Attack, though, sadly.
I’m looking forward to figuring out how it’s tied into Amazon Associates. There’s a lot of opportunity there for music bloggers to make some nice referral money promoting single tracks.
September 25th, 2007 at 9:27 am
Chris, I was thinking the same thing about Associates. I’d love to be able to create a JS widget that I could use to automatically look up songs via Amazon Web Services E-Commerce Service (AWS ECS) and link readers back to Amazon to purchase the track with a referral. Bonus points if I could inline the flash preview as well.
They’d make a killing off of the referrals.
September 25th, 2007 at 9:31 am
Simon points out that it is US only right now. It is understandable to launch US only, given that negotiating distribution contracts are tricky in foreign markets, but still a bummer.
September 25th, 2007 at 1:08 pm
awesome. thanks! i’ve already bought a couple songs.
to be fair, i’m not finding the coverage nearly as good as you two. i’m looking in mainstream hip-hop and rock, trance, and classical, though, not indie, which may be the difference.
(p.s. for some reason, openid here won’t play nice with the provider on my site. grr. gotta love interoperability!)
September 25th, 2007 at 4:37 pm
hey d, does the service allow indie artists to upload their own music?
September 25th, 2007 at 4:57 pm
Sean, no user-contributed content as far as I know. But man, that’s a killer feature.
September 25th, 2007 at 4:58 pm
Ryan, bah. The openid implementation is a wordpress plugin I found. It worked for me, but apparently your mileage did vary.