Url: http://www.amazon.com

I’ve just gone done buying some music on Amazon’s new AmasonMP3 service and I have to say I love it. Here are some pros and cons:

Pros:

• Download DRM-less MP3’s
• All top 100 Albums are $8.99 each!
• They aren’t trying to replace my media player (unlike iTunes)
• Their downloader is tiny and only used to facilitate downloading files and will even drop the files in Windows Media Player if you want (I didn’t).
• Album art (and all metadata) already in the ID4 tags!

Cons:

• No simple url to the site (like www.amazon.com/mp3 which takes you to a search for mp3 players).  Must go to the main site and find the link.  Annoying.
• No encoding choices.  Everything is encoded as 256 CBR.  It sounds great but it will annoy audio-philes.
• Its been reported that the MP3 files are watermarked to indicate they are from Amazon, but no personal information is stamped to the files, so I can live with this.

As they are competing with Apple and others, the decision to use DRM-less MP3 (instead of the DRM-less Apple format files that would need to be converted) and not to embed them with personal information (again, unlike iTunes) should be a boon to their bottom line.  I love it…