Like a few zillion other customers, I happily log onto Apple's online music store from time to time to exchange a few dollars for a handful of album tracks - sometimes a whole album or two.
I don't begrudge Apple a penny of the money I've spent through iTunes. My gripe is with digital rights management (DRM) - the industry's euphemism for copy protection.
This is a digital lock that limits the devices on which I can play most iTunes music to a handful of computers and Apple's own iPod portable players.
Most of Apple's big-time competitors, including Napster and Rhapsody, are no better. They use an entirely different copy protection scheme courtesy of Microsoft - and their songs won't play on the iPod.
This is an outrageous state of affairs - so I was delighted when Amazon.com, the online book-CD-and-everything-else seller, opened the "beta" version of its online music store last week.
Amazon MP3, as its name suggests, sells unprotected digital music files in a standard MP3 format.
They can be copied freely and played anywhere, anytime, on any device.
For now at least, Amazon is meeting and often beating Apple's prices. Amazon charges 89 cents to 99 cents a track and $5.69 to $9.99 for standard albums (more for larger collections).
Amazon's music also is recorded at a higher bit rate than Apple's standard tracks. Technically, that means more musical detail, but I'm not sure most of its customers will care.
After shopping on Amazon MP3, I have to give it an "A" for value, but it's way behind iTunes in ease of use and navigation.
That's not surprising, since Apple has been honing the iTunes music store user interface for four years, and it wouldn't surprise me if Amazon.com makes an effort to catch up after its shakedown cruise.
Major shortcoming
Amazon's major shortcoming - the breadth and depth of its collection - is easy to fix. True, Amazon boasts 2 million songs from more than 180,000 artists as diverse as 50 Cent, Amy Winehouse, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Nirvana, Ella Fitzgerald, Pink Floyd, Radiohead, Ray Charles and the Rolling Stones. But only two of the five major labels, Universal and EMI are in the catalog - the others still won't sell music without copy protection.
On the upside, Amazon does offer a roster of respected indie labels, including Alligator, HighTone, Madacy, Sanctuary, Rounder, Righteous Babe, Sugar Hill and Trojan Records.
