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.)