How I get music

To some people this post will be old news. Very old news. I still think it's important to spread the word though, because I know there are some people who don't know about it, and are using an alternative to spend their money on an (in my opinion) inferior product. I am, of course, talking about my love for Amazon MP3. Amazon launched their MP3 downloading service a few months back, and although I was sort of skeptical at first they've really won my fandom. The reason I was skeptical was because this isn't the first time a retailer tried to take on iTunes...Wal-Mart had their own online music service which wasn't anything to write home about.

Why is Amazon MP3 so great? A couple really simple reasons. First off, price. You can get an entire album for about $9.00. I think this is pretty much the most compelling thing about Amazon MP3, at this price I feel fine buying albums online. Next up is the quality, songs are (so far) all encoded at 256kbps. Last I knew iTunes was still 128kbps so you could say that Amazon's songs are higher quality. Of course unless you're a bit of an audiofile you might not be able to tell the difference but for some reason I always associate 128kbps with music file sharing clients like Kazaa and Limewire...basically I look at it as a bit shoddy.

Last but definitely not least is the lack of DRM in the songs. That means that you'll be able to play them on any player, not just iPods or in iTunes, without having to circumvent file types or break DRM. The songs are straight .mp3 by default so they can be played by basically any music player whether software or hardware. So how do you get the songs? You go to Amazon.com and search for the album you want, buy it, and they'll link you to the downloader application that pulls down the songs from Amazon. For an album the download usually takes 5 minutes for me on average, and of course the Amazon MP3 downloader notifies you as it downloads each song so you can start listening before the entire album has finished downloading. The app also plays nice with media players like Windows Media Player by automatically adding the songs to your music library with all proper track information as well as album art. The system isn't revolutionary, but you get your high-quality DRM free music for a great price and that's all that really matters, right?

In case you're wondering what made me decide to talk about Amazon MP3 I'll give you a little insight. Basically I was browsing the internet like I'm apt to do, and I hit up one of my favorite band's websites - FloggingMolly.com. The homepage had been transformed into a massive advertisement for their new album called Float. "How did I miss this," I wondered - but no problem because within 10 minutes I had located the album on Amazon and was listening to it. The album's great by the way, and it even entered the top 5 in the charts this week, which is impressive for an Irish folk/punk band. Check them out if that's your thing.

Now Playing:
Flogging Molly - (No More) Paddy's Lament
Condemned 2: Bloodshot