I bought some DRM-free music this weekend on Amazon MP3. The experience was fantastic. Its obvious that they really put a lot of thought into the user experience when they built the site. I already have an amazon.com account, so once I decided to make a purchase, the first thing it did was ask me if I wanted to install the Amazon MP3 downloader. I installed it, provided my account information, and my download started instantly. The download was REALLY fast…I downloaded Pink Floyd’s The Wall - a 2 disc set with a total of 26 songs - for $8.99, and the download of all of the songs took maybe 5 minutes at the most (over my broadband cable connection). The really nice thing about it was not only did it download the music, but it also automatically added it to my iTunes library. Very nice. From there I was able to instantly load it onto my iPod (I don’t have mine setup to automatically sync).

Overall the experience was fantastic. The prices are slightly better than iTunes, but I wouldn’t consider that alone to be worth switching. What *did* convince me was the experience, and the fact that all of their content is DRM-free. Ultimately, that means that I can do whatever I want with the content that I purchase/download, as many times as I want. I can burn as many physical CDs as I want or need to, can copy it to as many computers/devices as I want/need to, etc. Its as good as buying a CD, only more convenient. I can have my cake and eat it too. VERY nice.

The one thing that I noticed that I wasn’t real crazy about, was that it appears that in the process of automatically adding my purchased content to my iTunes library, the files seem to have been duplicated on my hard drive…taking up double the space. It appears that, when the files are downloaded, they are automatically organized into a folder in my Music folder called Amazon MP3. Everything I purchased/downloaded went in there. Then, I also noticed that in my iTunes Library folder (also in my Music folder), the same files were duplicated in there. Not sure if that’s a function of the Amazon downloader, or if iTunes did that for me when the content was automatically added to the library. Not really too big of a deal overall…I can manually delete the duplicate files if I ever need/want to, but definitely a mild annoyance. Certainly nothing even close to scaring me off. I’ll definitely be back.

By the way…we also picked up The Remix Game by Bitter:Sweet - very nice, mellow, laid-back modern jazz "mood music" - dig it…check it out if you’re into that kinda thing.