Spiffy Stuff Saturday - Amazon.com MP3s

If you haven't noticed, I'm a fan of Amazon.com's MP3 Downloads. While iTunes began dominating the market in the mid-2000s, Amazon.com was quietly offering free MP3 downloads from smaller record labels. In September of 2007, Amazon.com relaunched its download store¹ and has since gained the support of the major record labels².

The Pros and Cons:

Con: Amazon.com requires the installation of a download client.
Pro: It's a light-weight, non-obtrusive download client that adds newly downloaded music into your Windows Media Player.

Pro: DRM-free MP3s. The MP3 is yours to do with as you please. My household has five computers and a portable media device. I can copy my Amazon.com downloads to all of them.
Con: MP3s are, well, MP3s: a lossy data compression format. They're not going to sound as good as your CD, MPEG-4 SLS, WMA Lossless or the like.
Counter-Pro: Amazon.com's MP3s are generally 256 kbps which isn't too shabby.

Pro: They're cheap and there's lots of deals to be had. Their catalog has grown to a point where I can find most albums (even obscure albums) for around $9.
Con: It's digital media and prone to the corruptions and data loss (by hardware implosion) that any file is.
Counter-Pro: When the music is "out-of-print," the MP3 album is not only cheaper, but, more importantly, available.

But I mentioned deals and that's the true spiffiness of Amazon.com's MP3 Downloads:

• 25 Days of Free. From now until Dec. 25th Amazon.com is offering a free holiday MP3 every day. Everyone should have a few non-annoying Christmas songs...


• Daily Deals and Weekly Free MP3s. Sure, I didn't *need* Belinda Carlise's Heaven on Earth album, but as 99 cent daily deal? How could my 7th-grade-self resist? Generally, I use Dealnews.com to keep up to date.


• Pepsi Stuff. If you have an Amazon.com account, Pepsi's reward program integrates seemlessly with it. A refreshing change from CokeReward's Flash-bloated site.

Enjoy!