I'm not exactly mp3-savvy, but my forays into the music download space have been frustrating; ever since the heyday of Napster's (albeit illegal) peer-to-peer application, in fact, digital music has quite gone to shite. Yahoo's music player = teh suck! MTV's Urge (now Rhapsody) = slow. Napster = slow. iTunes = don't know because I don't have an iPod, nor am I interested in downloading a media player when I already have one on my machine. It's one thing to have users install a plug-in for a media player that they already have on their machine, but to have people install your own player is ballsy...that player better be really freaking amazing (yeah...I'm looking at you Yahoo and MusicMatch). So I'm always on the lookout for better alternatives or open to suggestions.
Amazon is now offering non-DRM MP3 downloads at or below the industry standard .99/9.99 price point. I like this for several reasons. 1) First off, I've always been a fan of their website...fast and easy to use, and I'm already a member with one-click payments on file and everything. I even go to their website and listen to their 30 second song snippets to sample new music, instead of whatever WMP plug-in I happen to be using at the moment; searching for music is generally faster than within WMP. 2) I like the burnable & transferrable non-DRM format that doesn't come with any usage restrictions (e.g. 3 burns or 3 sync devices). But 3) (and this is my favorite) I like that it doesn't come with their own p.o.s. Windows Media plug-in. They do have a download manager applet that sits outside of WMP, but it's a small download and un-intrusive program.
Obviously my ultimate, ideal, perfect-world dream would be if there were an affordable subscription service with non-DRM downloads, but since that is not realistic, I'll take what I can get. I canceled my Urge membership a few weeks ago because I was never actually using it. I don't have the time, patience, or interest to just sit and listen to new music and sync up my mp3 player all day. Once in a blue moon I want to listen to an album before paying for it, so I thought the subscription route would be cool. Instead I just ended up paying $15 a month for music I never listened to.
I just bought a mess of songs by The Decemberists, mostly singles and compilation tracks. Now, I don't normally shop for or buy CD singles, but the ability to d/l a non-DRM mp3 of songs of a band that I already know I like, is pretty damn awesome. From what I've read, Amazon's library is not the most extensive, but they had several tracks that either were not on Urge or were not easily find-able on Urge; either way gives Amazon the edge.
Ultimately I guess what I'm doing is getting away from subscription-based DRM files, to just buying music that I hope I will like in a burnable format that is cheaper than, say, going to Best Buy. If you actually want to possess an actual retail CD, then I still highly recommend LaLa, especially if you were like me and had a library full of embarrassing CDs that I never listened to anymore, that I could then "trade-up" for just $1.79. When I first started using LaLa, I had several hundred CDs, but over 100 of which I never listened to anymore (and I could always rip them to my computer if I wanted to keep them anyway); now I have several hundred CDs that I actually like. Then to help in discovering new music, I have been a subscriber of Yahoo's Launchcast for a couple of years now and I'll keep that going for like $4 a month, I think it is. I was disappointed when Yahoo's music purchase system turned out to suck, because I was already a member and I like their radio station functionality, the way it recommends new music. But they made you download a whole new player, not just some WMP plug-in, and it ended up being quite painful and it had very basic functionality at that. I remember I submitted a bug on it through their website, never got a good response nor did they ever fix it; so I lost interest in it.
I've gone on quite long, but as you can tell, I like me some music. I just don't know how to really manage it all. I'm fixing to go uninstall Urge. The fact that it scans my library constantly to come up with Auto Playlists while hogging my CPU the whole time, with no easy means to disable said functionality, irritates me to no end. Shame on you MTV, didn't you learn that lesson from Sony? I want digital music, not a virus.
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3 comments:
Sweet, Thanks for the tip, Moji. I already do 90% of my non-grocery shopping at Amazon.
I luvs me some tunes, too. Large capacity mp3 players have to be one of the best things invented for people like me. There is no radio station around here where the DJ says, "Coming up this hour, Rage Against the Machine, Elvis, The Beastie Boys, Glenn Campbell, Pantera, Merle Haggard, and AC/DC."
And I just realize what's really cool about this. Mrs. Slingaling and I use our Amazon.com Visa for almost all of our purchases, which means much free musak!
That's cool Slinger. I have downloaded several full albums off of Amazon so far, as well as a bunch of singles. I like it. The prices are great, now they do need to increase their library though.
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