The Amazon Music Store: Usability & Motives
Like many people, I like Simon & Garfunkel. And like a sizable proportion of such people, I like Simon without Garfunkel. And finally, like a not-so-sizable proportion of such people, I don't mind Garfunkel without Simon. As it happens, I really like one of his most saccharine songs, "Sometimes When I'm Dreaming". I've been looking for it for some time -- I had it on vinyl, but I didn't like Garfunkel enough to replace my vinyl with CDs, and I haven't seen that specific pop song appear on ITMS.
Oddly enough, the album it's supposed to be on is on ITMS, but that song is missing, and the album is not flagged as incomplete. Well, I thought, this is a great opportunity to try out the much vaunted Amazon DRM-free music store. Feel free to go try to find some stuff on the Amazon music store while I stay here.
Anyone claiming the Amazon music store is as convenient to use as ITMS (whether or not you have an iPod, I might add) is on crack. Oddly enough, it seems many of Apple's uncritical "fanboys" are even bigger "fanboys" of anything without DRM and so have been singing the praises of a service that offers some notable bargains over ITMS while lacking range and convenience.
I'd certainly be very happy to buy stuff from Amazon versus Apple (once I *found it* using ITMS or store) to save money and/or avoid DRM -- and I expect this is how Amazon will succeed -- but Amazon should be recognised for the parasitic "Burger King" strategy it's adopting on the usability side, and the motives of the cartel backing it which allow discounting and DRM-free music on the business side.
MacDonalds is famous for picking sites for its "restaurants" very carefully. Burger King is famous for placing its "restaurants" close to MacDonalds. Get the idea? Apple produces a market for digital music, fabulous tools for browsing, buying, and selling that music, and so forth. Amazon basically knocks together a half-assed website (e.g. when I tried to listen to tracks, it said I needed RealPlayer) but it offers discounts and no DRM. Exactly the way Amazon relies on brick and mortar retailers to let people browse and select books, it relies on Apple to let people browse and select music.
As for price and DRM-free music. Is Amazon offering the labels more than $0.70 per song? Apparently, the record companies which think Apple is greedy for only paying $0.70 per song in royalties out of its $0.99 less operational costs, R&D, marketing, etc. are OK selling songs encoded at double the bit-rate, DRM-free, for $0.10 less. Well, maybe Amazon is paying them a larger percentage, so let's look at Apple's DRM-free offerings ($1.29 each): presumably the music labels prefer to be paid some percentage of $0.89 by Amazon than $0.91 by Apple for the same track.
Wow, what does this sound like? It sounds like dumping! The most classic form of anticompetitive behavior by a monopoly or cartel (and the record labels are in fact both -- since only one label has the rights to, say, Simon & Garfunkel's music, and music by, say, Sting, isn't a substitute). So what we're seeing here is Amazon acting as a stooge for the music industry which would like to break the power of Apple's ITMS by dumping their music through a rival channel.
Well, I wouldn't be too concerned for Apple. First of all, Amazon has been selling stuff through its website since, what, 1995, and the user interface has been very slow to improve. Based on the current gap in usability between their MP3 store and ITMS, it will take them approximately forever to catch up, long before which Apple's usability folks will have incorporated telepathy and precognition into ITMS.
In the long run the music industry is, to put it simply, dead. They can thrash around suing teenagers and setting up gigantic anti-competitive dumping grounds to what we can optimistically call their hearts' content, but in the end, music has gone digital, digital stuff is easy to duplicate, and the music industry (as we know it) is an artifact of technology (vinyl records and CDs) that is obsolete. It didn't exist before we could record stuff, and it shouldn't exist now that recorded stuff is trivially easy to duplicate and broadcast.
