MrZaius.com

(Major Update: Amazon suddenly cut off international IP address access to their store, including from countries that lack separate Amazon storefronts and including military and aid workers, and right before Christmas. If only I’d seen it a week earlier: Could and would have shifted $1000 of my gift spending elsewhere. Perhaps you/others should?)

The competition:

As a longtime eMusic subscriber and regular user of Amie Street (popularity-based pricing for indie groups) I’ve been quite happy – Never a drop of DRM in sight, no restrictions as to what application or device or operating system I use to play their product. I don’t think I’ve bought a music CD for a couple of years, outside of concert venues. I’ve been a customer of Amazon since the late nineties, too, so it was fairly natural for me to give them a shot. I haven’t wanted much that wasn’t available through the thriving indie scenes on the other two sites, but I recently spotted that some rare older Desaperacidos was available on Amazon, so I gave it a shot. The downloader worked just fine in Ubuntu Hardy Heron, although it was apparently intended for users of Gutsy Gibbon.

Bitrates, id3 tags, et al:

All three of these firms publish reasonably complete id3 files on their tracks. Oddly eMusic doesn’t note that the files were pulled down from them, but the other two do. More interestingly, I’ve selected one file from each provider, and there was a rather radical gap in bit rates:

Amie Street test file from Blue Scholars – Bayani:
128kbps CBR

eMusic test file from Blue Scholar – The Long March:
256kbps CBR (Second test: Common Market – Connect For was encoded at ~168kbps VBR)

Amazon, from A Fine Frenzy – One Cell In The Sea:
320kbps CBR ***See second update below – Inconsistent***

Now isn’t that odd? This is one place I would expect very little variation – 192kbps or higher, ABR is what I’d have predicted, but there seems to be a tendency to stick to CBR and quite a bit of a difference in the quality level of these tracks.

That said, most users won’t be able to hear the difference anyway. Lossy compression is lossy compression. If you wanted quality more than convenience, you’d shell out the extra $2-3 to get it lasered onto plastic.
Price comparison:

In to hip-hop at all? I tend to enjoy any genre when brilliant lyricists are involved – The Blue Scholars are definitely that. Check out “The Long March” or one of their free podcasts at KEXP. Regardless, this nine-track album can be had for just $5.07 on Amie Street. On Amazon it runs $7.99, or $8.01 on a per/track basis ($0.89*9). eMusic, being subscription based, doesn’t make for an apples-apples comparison, but their subscription models run 30-40 cents per track for the normal subscriptions, bringing the price down to $2.70-3.60. Big caveat – eMusic has a use-it-or-lose-it subscription model. Hard to take into account the potential loss from failing to use it up completely. Blue Scholar’s Bayani is a touch more current and popular, the metrics used to automatically price media on Amie Street. There, it runs $8.98, compared to 8.99 at Amazon. Amazon’s pricing on all of these albums and every other one that I’ve looked at has been at a 2-3 dollar discount, compared to the CDs. Their pricing isn’t bad at all, though it isn’t always competitive.

Obviously availability for any of these services will vary from band to band, but in the case of the Blue Scholars, both Amie Street & Amazon offers MP3 downloads of all five albums, but eMusic has faltered, only offering the second and third oldest of the set. Amazon’s preexisting relationships with myriad labels (major and minor) puts them in a strong position here. Neither of the two independent services can match the total number of artists available to Amazon. The purportedly great ease of use of Amie Street from a producer’s perspective helps them keep up, with those bands that choose to participate. eMusic may sadly continue to fall behindin this changing environment.

But wait a second….

Both of the other MP3 downloading services that I mentioned allow future downloads of the tracks you bought and paid for. If you’re anything like me, you’d rip a CD the second you bought it, thereby automatically having a backup available. Clear enough corollary there, but that’s not the way Amazon does business. You buy it, you download it once and only once. This isn’t the end of the world/isn’t bad enough to prevent me from doing business with them, but it certainly does make me wary. What happens if a download fails? What happens if some borderline-incompetent person saves a file to a temporary location that gets purged before they hunt it down? What happens if the media you download it to fails before you back it up? You might be able to get the situation taken care of by customer service, but you shouldn’t have to.

Conclusion:

Pros:

• Highest quality tracks seen in this test
• Constant per-album, subscription free pricing at a substantial discount from CDs
• No DRM (like everyone else worth dealing with – there’s a reason I’m not using iTunes)
• The downloader’s not required on a per-track basis, and there doesn’t seem to be a big price difference

Cons:

• Seems to be a touch more expensive than Amie Street for most of the stuff I’d buy, but it’s hit or miss
• One download only
• As you’d expect, you also can’t stream the complete track  (Only Amie Street is willing to give you that)
• Why can’t they just generate a zip file with the tracks, instead of requiring a footprint on the PC to do full album downloads?

Good enough – I’ll keep pricing tracks at Amazon when eMusic doesn’t have what I’m looking for.

*UPDATE: Added screenshots. By the way, don’t take my word for their download working in Ubuntu Hardy Heron, or any other version of any other non-Windows OS. Try it for yourself: Free tracks.

The .deb installer properly creates menu items and MIME types for Amazon - Smooth integration.

Screenshot of Amazon's downloader in Linux

One point I missed, the installer is just a regular old Deb file. It’s not a full-blown apt repository with security updates, like it oughta be, but it beats the usual Linux “installers.”

*Second update* – My wife uses Rhapsody’s subscription service, and it works plenty well enough online and off, and is working just fine overseas from our Nepali IP address. That said, I didn’t compare their MP3 download service in this article, and I feel like I ought to. Check out this steal of an album from Amazon: two CD set of old Bob Newhart standup for $8.99 – It’s cheap enough on plastic, at $14.99, but that’s still substantial savings. Now check out this incredible insult from Rhapsody’s MP3 download site:

Rhapsody charges lazy suckers and the math-challenged an extra $2 for clicking on the buy-album link. Poor math-challenged Americans – First nationalized gambling, now this. Ain’t that teh suck?

SECOND UPDATE – INCONSISTENT PACKAGING:

I’ve purchased several more albums off of Amazon and Amie Street, and would like to point out two things:

1: The bitrate of the files on these sites is not standardized. I’ve seen both dip as low as 192kbps CBR, and I’ve seen Amazon go as high as 320kbps as noted above.

2: (This is the part that matters) All of the vendors above are inconsistent in their inclusion of ID3 tags. This sucks: Neglecting to have universally applied ID3v1/v1.1 tags makes it so that many MP3 players that base their playlists and menus on ID3 tag-based databases (such as my new Sansa Clip) are unable to properly sort these files. Unless you want to go through in Winamp and punch in the relevant data your self or use the open source command-line mp3info or id3info tags to do it en masse, you’re going to end up with a low quality product. This also raises issues about piracy and tracking these files: Common sense would dictate that, if they’re not shipping DRM, they would still embed a receipt or account number in the ID3 tag, allowing for users to demonstrate ownership and for media producers to track down pirates.

I’d like to point out at this time that it is TRIVIAL to apply these ID3 tags in a standardized format. The Linux command “id3tool -r $ARTIST -a $ALBUM *” is all it takes to make these files properly register in a Sansa Clip and many other players – The other stuff they’re perfectly happy to take from the filename. This could be done in bulk via a 20-30 minute script. Amazon, Amie, eMusic: Be a little less lazy and tag your products, please.

THIRD UPDATE – BLOCKED FOR OVERSEAS USERS, USG INCLUDED!

Much bigger problem: Three of the four services described here have recently (past 3-6 months) blocked access from my Nepali IP address, giving error messages that say that access to each is limited to American customers only. AmieStreet is the only exception, but even it is only partially open: The collected work of The M’s is available, but their front page “Pearl and the Beard” folks lost a potential impulse buy by restricting availability by region.

Regardless, Amazon & Rhapsody, the only two players deep enough in the mainstream to warrant a great deal of concern have both completely blocked access to their stores. While it seems unlikely that they can wiggle out of whatever poorly conceived, myopic, seemingly anti-trust & free trade violating contracts they’ve negotiated with the labels, we should at the very least demand that they reopen their stores to customers with APO, FPO, and diplomatic pouch (zip 20189) addresses. Surely we have clout enough and can make such an easy pitch mentioning patriotism and callous mistreatment of servicemen and women overseas that we can at least win that much.

Tags: amazon, amie street, consumer rights, drm, emusic, music, reviews