Tuesday, September 25, 2007  Amazon MP3 Store: great news for
Apple customers  Amazon's MP3 store is a smash hit among OS X
gurus like Gruber: Daring Fireball: The Amazon MP3 Store and
Amazon MP3 Downloader  ...The songs sound great and come with
high-resolution album art. Singles cost $.89 or $.99, and album
prices start as low as $4.99 — i.e. they’ve introduced variable
pricing to sell music for less, not more, than the iTunes Store.
When you search for songs from an artist whose entire catalog is
not available through their MP3 store, Amazon provides a direct
link to the artist’s catalog in their CD store. Two million
total songs is far less than the six million Apple offers at the
iTunes Store, but it’s a pretty good start, and all of Amazon
MP3’s songs are DRM-free. I’m not sure how many DRM-free iTunes
Plus tracks Apple offers, but it certainly seems like far fewer
than one-in-three, and thus far fewer than two million. So while
Amazon can’t claim to offer the most songs, they might be able
to claim the