Amazon MP3

With over 8,000 songs on my iTunes, it goes without saying I'm a fan of music. I've bought quite a few cool things from the iTunes music store over the years, but now I'm discovering the benefits of the Amazon MP3 store. The two main things I like about it are:

1. No DRM (Digital Rights Management). Whenever I download stuff from iTunes, I keep a separate playlist of things that have the DRM on them. I burn those tracks to a CD, then reimport them so I can listen to them on any computer, any device. When you download from Amazon, you just get a plain, simple MP3. No restrictions.

2. Cheap prices. When the latest U2 album was released, it was available on Amazon for $3.99. Way cheaper than Best Buy, Target or iTunes. Most songs are priced at $0.99, but some of their songs are also priced at $0.79 and $0.89. When they were released, the new Chris Cornell and Snow Patrol albums were around the $3.99 price, too.

The one thing that's a minor annoyance is the song downloads as a .amz file, for which you have to download a program (only once) to open. Then you can manually add the songs to your iTunes or set the preference to import it automatically (but have your music in two different folders, which would drive me nuts). Aside from the stuff that's exclusive to iTunes, I'd say Amazon's selection of MP3s is pretty equal. Give it a whirl, yo.