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And the Winner Is...
Amazon MP3 outshines iTunes in numerous ways. Its download
client is exceptionally compact and speedy; unlike its adver-
sary, Amazon MP3 doesn’t run in the background unless it’s
downloading something for you, and the client uses hardly any
memory. Amazon tracks are instantly transferred to a music
folder nestled comfortably in My Music, unlike the iTuneslibrary’s complicated file structure. And as a rule, Amazon MP
files are of a higher quality when burned to a compact disc
or transferred to a portable player, including the Apple iPod.
The impressive convenience and usability of Amazon’s service
makes us never want to go back to iTunes, let alone walk into a
record store.ROUND 3
AUDIO QUALITY
The majority of iTunes’s music is of-
fered at 128Kbps, while all Amazon
MP3s are encoded at 256Kbps—frankly,
we’d much rather have the larger file.
Apple’s DRM-free iTunes Plus tracks
are also encoded at 256Kbps, but as we
mentioned before, selection is limited.
Fortunately, iTunes Plus music is no
longer more expensive than standard
iTunes tracks.
WINNER: AMAZON MPROUND 4
PRICE
Pricing on iTunes is pretty straightfor-
ward: Singles cost 99 cents and albums
cost $9.99. Amazon MP3 offers more
variation: A signifi cant number of its
singles cost just 89 cents, including many
of its top 100 songs of the day; most other
tracks cost 99 cents. Full albums on Ama-
zon MP3 are priced between $5.99 and
$9.99, with top artists coming in one to
two dollars less than they cost on iTunes
(Miley Cyrus’s album 7 Things is only
$8.99, for example). What’s more, Ama-
zon MP3 offers a Friday Five for $5 deal,
which can lead to both an empty bank
account and an eclectic music library.
WINNER: AMAZON MPROUND 5
DISASTER RECOVERY
Don’t count on either service to help you restore
your entire library. In their respective published
terms of service, iTunes promises only to offer
credit (but no refunds) in the event you don’t receive
a product you paid for. Amazon encourages you to
promptly make backup copies and warns that you
bear all risk of loss after purchase.
We contacted iTunes customer service to help
us restore a song we lost during a hard drive failure.
It took the company two days to respond to our email
query (there is no phone support), and despite our
efforts, the song is still resting in the valley of the
dead. An Amazon customer service rep responded to
our phone message in less than a minute. We hadn’t
lost any Amazon MP3 songs, but the representative
assured us that we would receive store credit if we
happened to lose a few tracks.
ITUNES WINNER: AMAZON MP
http://www.apple.com