Happy day! There’s finally a service that will give iTunes a run for its money! It’s called AmazonMP3, and as I mentioned earlier, it features hig-quality DRM-free tracks for 89 or 99 cents per track and albums starting at $4.99. I am a longtime iTunes Store customer, but I decided to take Amazon’s new AmazonMP3 service out for a spin.

AmazonMP3 allows you to download tracks directly to your web browser, however, they recommend using a free helper application called Amazon MP3 Downloader (I know, it’s not the most clever name ever). Before I started exploring the store itself, I went ahead and downloaded and installed Amazon MP3 Downloader. After installing the software, I was taken to an instruction page which included link to download a free song in order to get a feel for how the service works. Since I’ve never purchased anything from Amazon before, I had to create an Amazon account to download the free song. The terms of use are your typical terms of use (songs are for personal use, etc…), however, this one section wins the Captain Obvious Award for this week:

All sales of Digital Content are final. We do not accept returns of Digital Content.

After all, it’s a little difficult to return a non-physical item, isn’t it?

As far as I could tell, Amazon does require you to enter credit card billing information. There doesn’t seem to be any way around this. A bank-issued debit card with a Visa or MasterCard logo works just fine, of course.  After I entered my billing information, I downloaded a 1.4-kilobyte .amz file, which handed the download task off to the Amazon MP3 Downloader application.

Amazon MP3 Downloader is a simple application; it is essentially nothing more than a basic download manager with some features specific to AmazonMP3. For example, in the Mac OS X version, all music files download to ~/Music/Amazon/MP3/[artist]/[album] by default. Also by default, songs downloaded with Amazon MP3 Downloader are automatically added to your iTunes library. Nice. My hunch is that the Windows version allows you to specify which application to add the tracks to, but I don’t have access to a PC to test this out.

Embedded in every song you download is high-quality album art, just like iTunes, and all the ID3 tags are filled out as you would expect.

AmazonMP3 is nothing more than a section of Amazon’s site. As such, its layout is similar to any other page on Amazon. Just like iTunes, you can play a short preview of each song before you download. Unlike iTunes, however, AmazonMP3 also features a “Preview all” button so you can sample all tracks on an album without clicking the preview button for each one. Album pages include a description and customer reviews as well.

By and large, Amazon did a great job with AmazonMP3. I personally prefer the layout of the iTunes Store (which is a better experience since it integrates seamlessly into the iTunes aplication), and the selection is a little thin as of right now, but considering you’re getting high-bitrate, DRM-free MP3s for the same prices as other stores’ DRM-protected, lower-bitrate selections, there is a lot to like.