Amazon MP3 Report Card

November 6, 2007 on 12:42 pm | In Uncategorized |

Last spring iTunes announced they would start selling non-DRM’ed AAC’s in addition to their DRM’ed (Digital Rights Managed) tracks A few months later Amazon.com followed suit, offering MP3’s. This announcements was greeted by a combination of hope and skepticism –

Hope: MP3’s are the only extant technology for playing our music wherever and whenever we want. I can play my MP3’s on my boombox, my car stereo, my cellphone, my Windows PC, my PDA, my Linux box, my Sonos system, and every portable music player ever made. There’s a reason why most people refer to portable music players, generically, as “MP3-players”. Even the best-meaning DRM schemes straitjacket the customer into playing his music only on approved devices and only with specific software. Plus, the various DRM schemes are incompatible with each other: music that can be played on a Zune can’t be played on an iPod, for instance.

Skepticism: The major labels are stuck in some Currier-and-Ives, Norman Rockwell timewarp where the Beaver Cleaver clan all sit down around the family phonograph and bask in the warm glow of the tubes listening to Lawrence Welk, while that juvenile delinquent, Eddie Haskell, skulks outside the window with a thumbdrive of stolen MP3’s that will land him in reform school. There’s no way the industry would release their good music in a non-DRM’ed format.

I know it’s still early days but I decided to run a preliminary test. I’ve been building up a “Jack Radio” playlist for my Sonos system and iPod (see this entry for a description of “Jack Radio”) and I wanted to fill in a few holes in my collection. I identified thirty songs from about 1970 through the 1990’s that I wanted to add. They were all major hits by major bands and all are still in print as CDs. Examples ranged from from Genesis “Land of Confusion” to Phil Collins “In The Air Tonight” to “Tom Sawyer” by Rush to “West End Girls” by the Pet Shop Boys to “Barracuda” by Heart.

My requirement was that the track had to be the original hit version by the band in question, not a later live or acoustic version (unless, of course, that WAS the hit). I looked on Amazon.com for my MP3’s and, as a control, checked for the same songs in non-DRM’ed AAC on iTunes.

The results: Amazon.com had six; iTunes had one! I’ll give Amazon a “C-“ and iTunes an “F”.

So the golden age of legal, DRM-free music distribution has clearly not arrived. Whether this is just because it’s still too early, or whether it’s because the record companies are withholding their best stuff is unclear. In support of the former hypothesis is that fact that there’s such a disparity between iTunes and Amazon – if it was just a case of labels not allowing their music to be DRM-free then I would expect both services to have access (or lack thereof) to the same music. On the other hand, if the labels aren’t withholding their best stuff then how to explain why secondary versions – live, acoustic, tribute-band, and karaoke tracks - of big hits are all for sale? If it was just a feverish rush to digitize a fat library of songs why start with those?