I just spent 30 minutes tooling around in
Amazon's MP3 Store. After reading the reviews and whatnot, I was pleasantly surprised with exactly the experience that was promised--tons of music, all of which is priced relatively cheaply, with a light-weight cross-platform downloading program (whose usage, best of all, is OPTIONAL).
It's spooky how well this store is put together. The (unfortunately Flash-based) preview applet is non-intrusive, opens no new windows, and works nicely. I've been wanting Kanye West's
Stronger, so I got it. Easy-peasy. I also bought Year Zero and Human After All for about $8 each. No DRM, high-quality. The coolest thing?
I had free access to those albums anyway, but in lower quality rips from friends.
Do you hear me, you media conglomerate bastards? (Of course you don't, but I'll talk anyway.) You
will sell more music if you sell it without being a bunch of money-grubbing fiends. Customers
will stop stealing music if you actually treat them like valuable customers.