girtby.net

Amazon recently opened their MP3 store (in “beta” of course). It is awesome.

I don’t know about you, but I certainly didn’t see it coming. Previous Amazon efforts with downloaded content were pretty lame, and I had no idea that they were going to come back with an offering that was as good as this.

Although I am a very happy bleep.com customer, their selection of music is limited to the Warp label plus a couple of degrees of separation. So I’ve been looking around at other DRM-free music stores, but few have excited me enough to become customers.

Amazon’s catalogue of music is quite large and hopefully getting larger. Most importantly, they have an extensive back-catalogue into which I have been delving in my quest to go legit, and to reclaim old legitimately-purchased albums that have got lost along the way. The purchase and download process is very easy and efficient.

I can also get individual songs from those long-lost albums. Somehow though I managed to turn on the infamous one-click purchase, so rather than bundling up a bunch of individual tracks and purchasing them en masse, Amazon conducts a separate transaction for each one. But no matter.

So if you have a US credit card, do yourself a favour and check it out. This, plus the new Radiohead release, make me think we’ve finally reached the point where purchasing legitimate DRM-free music is easier than stealing it.