Thursday 8 January 2009

iTunes DRM-free switched me to Amazon MP3!

Over Christmas Day and Boxing Day, Amazon.co.uk offered a £3 off promotional gift certificate on any purchase from its newly launched MP3 store! I brought this to the attention of my Twitter followers!

Joyfully, I purchased and downloaded Katy Perry's "One of the Boys" for free (after applying the £3 discount code)! The sampling quality is more than acceptable, for listening to music on the go, and devoid of any draconian DRM limitations!

Before making any purchases download the Amazon MP3 Downloader! I recommend you use Firefox 3 (or later) for all purchases from the Amazon MP3 store!

Fast forward to this week's nondescript Macworld Keynote, which will be the last Apple attends, where Phil Schiller announced that the iTunes store will be entirely DRM-free by the summer!

Just for fun I checked my iTunes account and discovered that, currently, I can upgrade 432 songs for the grand total of £67.01:

140 songs
26 albums
2 music videos

At the moment there are too many limitations on the path to the promised land of DRM-free music! The biggest 'deal breaker', for me, is the lack of an a la carte option! What if I only wanted to upgrade selected albums/songs? And what about the Single of the Week? Why should customers pay now?

Until Apple rethinks this strategy, my future digital music purchases will be exclusively from the Amazon MP3 store! A few months ago, the notion would've been anathema to me! What say you?

You should follow me on twitter here.

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for your thoughts on music downloads. I've not been buying much from iTunes as of late, and I have yet to try AmazonMp3. Now, I'm going to give it a looksie.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. 12 years on, I stream everything and subscribe to Apple One.

      Delete

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