Title: Amazon MP3
Publisher: Amazon
URL: click here
Cost: pay as you go
Tested: continuously
There have been dozens of legal music services offering immediately downloadable music, such as Napster, Yahoo Music Unlimited, Rhapsody, (and ten times as many —arguably— illegal sites) where you can search for music, and stream and/or download tracks. Some of the undoubtedly legal ones have collections larger than Amazon MP3, but they require monthly membership fees, plus a portion of their entire collection is only for streaming not for downloading, so don't take those numbers at face value. In addition, you are still only leasing songs through these services, not owning them. There are more limitations as for what you can do with the music, and how many times, than in a time-share agreement for an apartment on Maui. In some cases, if you don't renew your subscription, your access to your collection stops. For fairness, the option for buying songs was gradually introduced in some of these service for an extra fee on top of the subscription.
The proprietary formats add another nightmare, especially if you want to switch from one portable player brand to another. For these reasons, I had a subscription only to eMusic for more than a year because it offered good subscription price and a MP3 music format that had no limitations and did not require me to bow three times facing toward Redmond or Silicon Valley or Hollywood before creating another playlist for another CD-burn session. However, the choice of music was much too limited for me (even for my musical preferences of modest range). In the typical subscription inertia (that makes companies so much motivated to make you and keep you committed), I did not cancel it for quite some time, but when I finally did, and added up the costs, I knew that I would not subscribe to any of the much more expensive services. (Incidentally, eMusic now has 2.8 million MP3 songs and audio books, but it still requires monthly subscription).
I like the iTune store of Apple for its pay-as-you-go policy, but I did not like the inconvenience of converting music to MP3 to play it back from a CD player with MP3 firmware enhancement. I do have a very modest Ipod Nano, but the low battery life makes it inconvenient for my often very long-haul flights, and I need the flexibility and freedom of MP3. I am certainly not alone with this requirement.
I don't think that there is a rosy future for online services that offer downloadable music using DRM technology, requiring subscription, and various restrictions, but music industry specialists have a different opinion. I started to settle on buying CD-audio albums and create MP3 copies of the songs I liked, but I have been longing for the option of buying on a song by song basis (unless it is a new Mark Knopfler album, which I buy as soon as it comes out as there are rarely any songs that I would not like from him).
It is no wonder that Sony (which is way below its summit of the Walkman age), recently announced that by Spring, 2008 it would close its ailing Connect Music service, which features the very unattractive ATRAC compression format, and a pathetic software. In general, I grew deeply disappointed with the legendary brand, and I refrain from buying any Sony products after I bought in a hurry a VAIO laptop three years ago which cost more than twice as much as a comparable Taiwanese laptop, and the Sony performed half as well and less reliably). Still, Sony is the second largest music producer, and its absence from almost all of the third party online sites that provide downloadable music and related metadata and information is a considerable limitation both for those who want to have access to the music, and for those who use it for reference purposes.
This is important when researchers have to find out, for example, who has covered a famous song; which country singers have the most albums; what tracks are on an album; on which albums would one find a specific folk song; etc. At least on Amazon MP3, the CD audio collection can alleviate this problem of absent Sony assets, as the search in the Amazon MP3 section can be extended to the CD audio section, which does include the Sony recordings and metadata, although not for downloading.
For ready reference purposes, it is wise to use the non-MP3 section first to find the answer to a reference question, look up popularity lists, and then switch to the MP3 section for stats related to a smaller subset of 262,000 album and 3 million tracks. Smaller is a relative term, indeed.
Amazon made me jump when it announced in September its MP3, pay-as-you-go service. At that time, it had "only" 2 million songs of about 180,000 albums, but at the end of December, 2007 Amazon made a deal with the Warner Music Group, and increased the total number of songs to slightly above 3 million in nearly 262,000 albums by the last day of the year when I finished this review. Its content features 256 Kbps recording density, which is perceivable even for tin eared music fans like myself, and was quite unique in this market arena where 128 Kbs is dominant, with a few 192 Kbps recording.
Unfortunately, Amazon's MP3 service does not cover music produced and owned by Sony (and its labels), but this is a common limitation at most of the legal music download sites. I know of one exception, Rhapsody, which does have many Sony albums which are not available even in proprietary format from its major competitors. For example, you would not find a single downloadable album from the Indigo Girls at the iTunes Store, or Napster, while Rhapsody comes up with 32 albums, and 242 songs. Napster brings up a song from Pink's album where the Indigo Girls are guests in the "Mr. President", but iTunes has nothing at all. In the downloadable subset of Yahoo Music (called Yahoo Music Unlimited), one can see five of their top songs, but without a subscription it cannot be determined which albums are included in this section of Yahoo Music (which has "only" 2 million downloadable tracks).
Amazon MP3 brings up two albums for the search on Indigo Girls. There are two songs on an album made of a November, 2007 concert. The album other is a special genre of music from the "Picking on …" series which is —to put it mildly— like the cover of popular songs by a guitarist in a bar of a very small town, after all the guys and gals have left, who is tuning up for his next gig at the senior citizen home—way south of Saratoga.
There used to be six big record companies, called the Big Six, but because of mega mergers, by now the moniker changed to Big Four (Universal, Sony, Warner and EMI). This concentration is never a good sign for customers as competition decreases among the labels. These four labels own and produce 80% of the music, and independent labels do the rest. Within the Big Four, Universal is far the largest (after acquiring PolyGram), twice as large in term of albums and artists as Warner, and three times as large as EMI. Sony, including the assets of the former BMG, is almost as large as Universal.
This is not merely a question of size, but as much if not more a question of importance, because Sony has or had the contract with many of the most popular performers and composers for at least a part of their career, ranging from Britney Spears, Celine Dion, Diana Ross, Dolly Parton, Elvis Presley, NAS, New Kids on the Block to TLC, Tony Bennett and Whitney Houston.
My personal preferences are very much affected also, missing most of the songs of Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, the Indigo Girls, Leonard Cohen—except for a very few mixes, and for the endless streams of karaoke implementations, and covers in the "Picking on …" series and the tribute albums by the likes of American Boys, the Piano Men (specializing on covering the songs of The Piano Man), and Vitamin String Quartet—I am not making this up.
Then again, there is always a crowd around Elvis impersonators on the Strip in Las Vegas who seem to enjoy the moment, so there may be an interest in downloading and paying for recordings by these cover bands, and my taste for the original may seem as bad for others.
I am more lucky with songs of Johnny Cash, Rod Stewart and Kris Kristofferson, who fare much better in Amazon MP3 as they had many of the recordings with a company other than Sony for a significant part of their career. I had excellent hit rates in Amazon MP3 for Phil Collins and Pink Floyd.
As for the genre composition of the collection, I ran a statistical search. It is to be noted that on the average 1.7 genres are assigned to each track. Pop and Rock has by far the largest share with about 15% each. Somewhat surprisingly, International (not including Latina music) and Classical represent the second largest strata with 9% each, followed closely by Alternative Rock at 8% and by Jazz and Dance/DJ albums at 6% each. Folk and Rap/Hip Hop hover around 3.6%, then come Opera/Vocal, Latin Music and Country close to 3%, followed by Blues, R&B;, and Hard Rock/Metal with between 2.1-2.4%. Christian, Gospel and New Age are neck in neck with 1.6%, and the rest is Soundtracks, Broadways, Children Music and Miscellaneous.
It is not possible systematically to determine the age distribution of the albums in the Amazon MP3 store but sample tests indicate that even the earliest albums of the artists are present in the collection—except for those, of course, which are owned by Sony. In addition to music you will find the typically short (and occasionally very long) and current bios from All Music Guide with a not always characteristic photo for many of the most popular performers. There are customer reviews and ratings, but they are rarely useful enough to be worth wading through. As opposed to its excellent book collections, Amazon MP3 has no reviews from music review magazines. The non-MP3 Music section at least often has the always gushing product description from the publisher for some background information, and an Amazon editorial review, which sometimes is not only merely informative, but hilariously so. The editorial review by Alanna Nash about the duet album of Raising Sand (featuring my beloved Alison Krauss), sets the scene with the opening statement. "Perhaps only the fantasy duo of King Kong and Bambi could be a more bizarre pairing than Robert Plant and Alison Krauss. Yet on Raising Sand, their haunting and brilliant collaboration, the Led Zeppelin screamer and Nashville's most hypnotic song whisperer seem made for each other". The review also has the perfect conclusion for the album: "..[w]hen Krauss begins this strange, seductive song in a voice so ethereal that angels will take note, you may stop breathing. That, among other reasons, makes Raising Sand an album to die for". You will not find either the publisher blurb or the review in the MP3 section, but at least the summary score of the 292 customers review (4 stars of 5), and especially the Amazon sales ranking of #5 among all the MP3 albums, and #1 rank in three genres gives more than a hint that it is a very good album. It would be also useful to have the popularity of the tracks of an album when the album details are shown—as is the case in iTune. This is of course at least partly a software feature.
Apart from the ranking feature and browsing option, the software is somewhat disappointing. Browsing is fine, because it is a good start to look at the list of bestselling albums, songs and artists. The list of the top 400 for each category is updated hourly. This is more comprehensive than the popularity lists in the non-MP3 music section of Amazon. There is a separate list for the pop category.
Within each bestseller list (except for the artist category), there are ranked lists by genre which can be narrowed by sub-genre, like country as main genre, then contemporary, traditional, western, honky tonk, bluegrass sub-genres. There is also a browsable list of new and upcoming albums, such as the Paul Simon's 1964-1993 selection, to be released on January 8, 2008. These compensate quite well the very limited and deficient direct search options.
It would have been a much better idea to make the MP3 subset part of the Amazon Music section, which offers more functionality—to start with. This would have kept the music stuff under one roof, making it easier for the users to navigate. All that would have been needed is to add an entry for MP3 to the form options on the advanced mode query template.
Instead, Amazon MP3 store has its unintuitive, and misleading, own search options. Seemingly, there is no search option by artist/band name but only by album and track title. Luckily, it is not so. If you type in an artist or band name for the MP3 Download index, a cluster of names that match or partially match the name of the artist or the band will be displayed . (You may directly combine in this index the name of the performer and the album or track title if you want to find a specific album or song by an artist)
Once you choose the name of the artist you need, the biography entry from AMG (if available) and the listing will be displayed. Listing may be an exaggeration , of course, for those affiliated with Sony, such as Billy Joel or Pink, who appear with a single track for the reason that most of their albums are the results of long term Sony deals.
The problem comes when you don't know the name of the performer, but know that the song title was "Philadelphia" in a movie (and not "Streets of Philadelphia" from Bruce Springsteen). There are 1,188 songs reported by the Amazon search engine that purportedly have "Philadelphia" in their title—which seems to be excessive, and indeed, it is.
When looking at the list, it is clear that the word was picked up from the artist index, with several hundreds of tracks of "songs" performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra. You can narrow the search to the Soundtracks genre from the cluster in the left panel of the screen, but even then there is a list of 66 "songs" and none of them is the one you are looking for. The list is not sortable by song title or artist.
In such cases, it may be better to search the CD-music store (which indeed searches the title index when you ask so), locate the CD for the movie Philadelphia, and check to see if there is an MP3 version for it. Well, there is none, but at least you learn that Neill Young had a song titled Philadelphia in the eponymous movie.
The layout of the results, and the use of the screen real estate are mostly good, except for the ones which show a large number of album covers for a popular band. It requires unnecessary vertical and horizontal scrolling as shown in the example of Gipsy Kings. It could be simply improved by showing a somewhat smaller icon for the MP3 download link and album images, and juxtapose the icon to the price tag. This change could accommodate four items in a row.
Amazon's MP3 download service already has had a huge impact on the market. Apple, which likes not only to be a trailblazer, but also a flaunter and taunter, almost immediately followed suit, and launched its DRM-free iTunes Plus service, and doubled the density rate of the recordings from 128 Kbps to 256 Kbps. Wal-Mart started to offer DRM-free MP3 tracks and albums at about the same price as Amazon, but it has currently only about 1 million tracks, runs only under Internet Explorer, and the search can't be limited to MP3 recordings. The result is always a mix of over-protected WMA and unprotected MP3 records, and users often will have to wade through long and very long lists. This can be quite frustrating as is the case with Phil Collins with more than 150 songs, but only with a single one in MP3 format. You find this out scrolling down with increasing impatience because the recording format is not even a sort criterion in presenting the results.
This project is yet another very good move by Amazon. It is not impossible that Amazon also would be able to reach a deal with Sony sooner than Apple, because Apple is a competitor of Sony in the portable audio and video player field, and Amazon is not, not even with the launch of Kindle. The universally supported MP3 format without any usage restrictions is a huge advantage, and so is the decision that no monthly or yearly subscriptions are required.
