That Geeky Christian

In the great landscape that is the internet, many options for obtaining digital music abound.  What is the best choice?  Well, that depends on the preferences of the one downloading.  Some prefer iTunes, while others like subscription services.  For me, the best service is from Amazon.com.

Most people don’t think of Amazon when they think of purchasing online music.  I’ll be honest, when I first heard about the service I dismissed it as too difficult without even trying it.  However, I later found out how easy it was to integrate with iTunes, and I decided to give it a shot.  Before I get into that, let’s take a look at what else is nice about Amazon MP3.

Amazon MP3 sells DRM (Digital Rights Management) free music.  That means that it doesn’t matter if you play your music on one computer, one hundred computers, or 75 iPods.  It will play on anything at any time because none of the files contain copy protection.  This is a big plus over iTunes which uses a fairly restrictive DRM.  Also, single tracks cost no more than $0.99 with many tracks costing less, and over 1,000 free songs!  Each Friday Amazon offers a new set of albums for five dollars, with many other deals during the week.  For the budget minded,this is great news!

Amazon’s strongest feature, however, is iTunes itself.  Like it or not, the iPod is the most popular MP3 player on the market and the way to load music onto the iPod is with iTunes.  Amazon’s greatest strength is its ability to load the songs that are purchased from the site directly into iTunes, all it takes is a small program to be downloaded to the user’s system.  Once the program is downloaded the user can literally purchase music with one click just like in iTunes, but cheaper, and more accessible.

So, give it a try!  So many free songs are available, you have nothing to lose!