Monday, October 8, 2007

amazon.com mp3 shop - also available for non-us consumers

Last weekend I was reading that this download shop is also accessible for us people overseas:
Simply use your credit card and fake an US billing address - only the ZIP code need to match. So I created a new amazon.com account added my details with my German credit card and billing address 550 Madison, NY and than checked out the shop.

First of all it looks the same as the usual shopping cds at amazon and so I instantly liked it. Checking out the charts I recognized that our friends at Universal have chosen to make a big part of their catalog available as MP3's, EMI of course too and a lot of US Indies. Currently I am not buying music digitally because I simply not like DRM (call my and I will explain in detail why) and rather still buy CDs and rip them into my Itunes. So I was pretty exited to check out the shop.

To download with "1 Click" you have to install an "amazon download" manager which worked alright on my Mac and which downloads the tracks to a new folder (you can also choose to have it added to your iTunes automatically).

So I started to put some music into my basket. Being a little bit cautious I started with just one track from the "Apples in Stereo" for 0,89 cents (pretty cheap price especially if you live in EURO land) - all good and after I moved it my Itunes library I recognized that it's been encoded into 256kbps - nice quality and better than I usually use when I rip my CDs.

So why not to buy an album - I checked out "Spoon" and bought the full album for 8,99 $ - nice stuff and also the download worked fast and smooth. Later that day I bought the latest from "Stars" and an old record from "The National" which is not available yet in Germany.

Actually I spend more money than my total Itunes spending was in the past three years. If you check out the charts on the site looks like there is a lot of old "classic" songs like Verve , Nirvana or Don Mclean alongside new releases and my gut feeling is that this shop will turn more CD buyers into digital music buyers (and hopefully also some who get their music from illegal sites yet).

The sad part of it is of course that there is no SONY BMG or WARNER MP3's in that shop (that my opinion as a consumer) and that there is no news yet about how SONY BMG will deal with DRM in the future. We keep patient but want and need to know soon (that my opinion as a SONY BMG marketing guy).

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