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Amazon’s Music Download Site is Cheaper Than iTunes 78% of the Time
- brownbat 13y agoI have no idea how to even give Apple money for music without installing iTunes, which always struck me as bloatware. Building a device, a software music player, and a marketplace that all require each other was a brilliant strategy to reap monopoly profits, but it might not be the most pro-consumer strategy...
- kaolinite 13y agoYou either install iTunes or you use someone else. Apple aren't interested in catering to 100 different music applications and 1000 different music devices - either join the ecosystem and gain the advantages, or don't. That strategy doesn't sit well with some people but for most consumers, it's the easiest way to get songs on their phone reliably and in good quality. The same also goes for films, TV shows, etc, with Apple TV. I agree though, the iTunes software is pretty awful and even worse on Windows I hear.
- bane 13y ago> Apple aren't interested in catering to 100 different music applications and 1000 different music devices They don't really have to. Put up a storefront on the web like every other 21st century company and let people download mp3s and flacs and they're good to go. A simple mp3->iDevice utility is all it would take to simplify importing onto a device and even better you should just be able to cloudplay purchased iTunes songs on your iDevice and/or download/push to the device directly. iTunes serves almost no purpose in a modern world.
- aroman 13y agoYou're saying this as if Apple is some naive newcomer to the world of online music. > iTunes serves almost no purpose in a modern world. Seriously? iTunes invented modern online music distribution. It singlehandedly heralded in the age of digital music distribution. Just because you don't like the fact that you can't download music from them without using their (very good, in my experience) music player doesn't mean it's useless or their strategy is broken. They know exactly what you've outlined, and they knew it long before you did. Why don't they do it? Because it's antithetical to their business model. Simple as that.
- bane 13y ago> Because it's antithetical to their business model. Simple as that. I agree. Their model is built around locking consumers into this artificial and, these days, complete unnecessary workflow. The next model Apple will have to go to is simple, the competitors are already there: iTunes on the web, cloud stream to your iDevice. But even then this will only work so long as iTunes continues to offer exclusive content that you can't get elsewhere, and that's also rapidly diminshing . As a content provider would you like to be locked into one platform or show up on as many as possible? > iTunes invented modern online music distribution. So? Their model is now, quite frankly and charitably, old fashioned. The only current purpose of which these days is to try and keep people from fleeing to other, better, platforms.
- aroman 13y ago> The only current purpose of which these days is to try and keep people from fleeing to other, better, platforms. I can't refute this claim any more than you can back it up, so lets not waste our fingers on an argument about it. I agree with everything else you said, though.
- bane 13y agoHonest question though, and not meant to be argumentative (you already know my thinking on it). What does iTunes do for consumers that the other competing methods (online storefront, stream cloud to device, etc.) don't?
- nemothekid 13y agoI'd imagine its for these couple reasons. 1.) None of the iPod's except the touch have WiFi or any internet connectivity. Can't stream cloud to device if theres no connection. 2.) Infrastructure. Consider for a second that albums routinely push 100+MB, and think about pushing that over 3G/LTE. Telcos will make a fuss, etc. Yeah you can force downloading only over WiFi, but then again whats the point? iTunes already has WiFi sync, and to most people that would be the exact same thing. 3.) iTunes is already there and most people already have it installed. If you don't like it, you can also use the online store on the phone. What it starts boiling down to, is Apple is going to spend x-y million dollars building an online marketplace for some people who don't want to install iTunes. What does an online storefront do for consumers that iTunes doesn't?
- comex 13y agoAlmost nobody wants to manually drag music files from a web browser's download manager into some app. There are exceptions, but Apple almost certainly doesn't care about those users. You can already download iTunes songs directly from iOS devices if you wish - it's been possible since 2008, IIRC.
- ctdonath 13y agoiTunes doesn't exist to sell music. iTunes exists to give you a reason to buy into, and/or stay in, the Apple ecosystem - to wit, sell Apple hardware. Apple has zero interest in providing anything that doesn't sell more hardware. They're not going to prevent it (ex.: someone buying & playing music on iTunes on Windows), but they understand that everything they do must serve the core: sell hardware.
- rednukleus 13y ago> for most consumers, it's the easiest way to get songs on their phone reliably and in good quality If and only if they only use iDevices. Otherwise it is easier and cheaper to go elsewhere.
- rsynnott 13y agoiTunes is a pretty low-margin service; it's really there to shift iPods and iPhones, not to make money as a store.
- kaolinite 13y agoWell yes. iTunes is a service first and foremost for Apple customers. That's why they care so little about supporting Android, etc. No other platform/ecosystem is as straight-forward however, although Google is getting better now that it has Chromecast.
- dublinben 13y ago>No other platform/ecosystem is as straight-forward however I would argue that both the Google Play ecosystem and Amazon's media ecosystem are just as integrated and easy to use as Apple's.
- kaolinite 13y agoThey're getting there but I don't think they're quite there yet. Amazon has no presence on TV or (afaik) desktop, besides web which is pretty poor for music (i.e. no AirPlay integration, no media keys). Google has Chromecast now which is a really good step forward but it's more about streaming seemingly. GoogleTV was a bit of a flop. Both Google and Amazon are catching up and offer very good services (which may cover your uses - e.g. if you don't use your laptop for music or don't stream music), however they don't offer quite as much as Apple as of yet. Can't wait to see what they bring out over the next few years though.
- officemonkey 13y ago
- mikevm 13y ago> either join the ecosystem and gain the advantages, or don't. Yar - har - fiddle-dee-dee....
- aroman 13y agoI can't decide if I'm happy or embarrassed to have caught this reference. (I assume it was a reference to Patchy the Pirate, right?)
- dionidium 13y agoIt also means there's a cost to buying outside of the Apple ecosystem. I was downloading some previously purchased albums to a new device a couple days ago and couldn't find one in my "Purchased Items" that I knew I had purchased. Turns out, I had got it for half the price on Amazon a while back, but by the time I realized that, I wished I would have just paid the full iTunes price so that I could have re-downloaded it from iTunes like all the others.
- eddieroger 13y agoI don't get why people hate on iTunes so much (on Mac - on Windows, sure, it sucks, because porting Cocoa to Windows is not only hard but dumb). I've used it since version 1, and have moved the same library forward since - over a decade, and through 11 versions of iTunes. There were some dark times, but it still runs fine for me, and does what it needs to do; simply, manage my digital media and shuttling it between my iPhone, iPad or AppleTV.
- notatoad 13y agoIt's a pro-consumer strategy for a specific set of consumers. if you're the sort of person who wants to choose a music player, buy your music elsewhere. there's a very large market for whom "what music player should i use" is not a question they ever want to have to ask themselves. Apple does an excellent job of making sure they never have to.
- denzil_correa 13y agoIMO, the difference here is that Apple has iTunes - a music player on all of its iOS devices. Amazon only sells the music but lacks a software like iTunes.
- RobAtticus 13y agoDo you mean specifically for iOS? Amazon has a mp3 app for Android and has its cloud player that works on other devices as well.
- bgilroy26 13y agoI use cloud player daily
- officemonkey 13y agoAmazon MP3 downloader moves all your purchased tunes into iTunes for your enjoyment. Of course, nothing prevents you from using the music on any other player. BTW, what are the other players out there? Anybody using Winamp? Songbird?
- dropawaywaytogo 13y agoSpotify. "Geeks" use foobar2000 or rythmbox.
- nightpool 13y agoA lot of less technical music geeks prefer winamp, but as a more technical user I really love Foobar2000. doesn't have any of the flashy UI of other player, but the UX is really top notch once you learn your way around it. My favorite part is how it adheres to the pythonic principle of "Explicit is better then implicit" in playback. You have your library and your playlist, and you play things my adding them to your playlist from your library. Dead simple, and easy to do plenty of complicated stuff with. Also it has a huge plugin community, and can even cater to every audiophile whim, if you swing that way.
- 13y ago
- bgilroy26 13y agoProbably relevant: Amazon's "$10" albums are $9.49 whereas iTunes "$10" albums are 9.99 From the article, the average savings is $1.08, so I think those 50c make up a large part of the population of savings.
- JohnTHaller 13y agoThose 50c saving bring the average DOWN since they're below the average savings of $1.08. On average, Amazon is an even better deal than just a 50c cheaper album.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- lmg643 13y agoI've been buying Mp3s from amazon for years - and the amazon downloader loads them to itunes seamlessly. i started using amazon when itunes had a problem downloading MP3s properly - i keep my mp3 library on a NAS drive and amazon would write the file to C: before moving to the network, never seemed to have a problem. Itunes had a problem with this for a year or so before it seemed to resolve. itunes support was not helpful with this. Plus - amazon has no conversion issues. i sometimes speed up songs for running using audacity, and you need to convert mp4s to mp3s before you can do this. with amazon - no conversion required. not to mention that it is cheaper, sometimes 5.49 vs 9.99 for an album. and now you can use the amazon cloudplayer from any computer. and they were giving away a special on cloud storage so i uploaded a copy of my old MP3s to amazon.
- gav 13y agoI too prefer buying from Amazon, for mostly the same reasons. I had assumed that it was saving me money too, so I checked the last 8 albums I bought: Amazon | iTunes 6.99 | 6.99 9.49 | 9.99 7.99 | 7.99 5.00* | 7.99 5.00* | 7.99 7.99 | 7.99 5.99 | 7.99 7.99 | 7.99 * Part of their X albums for $5 promotion. So it seems that iTunes is a lot more price competitive than I thought.
- corin_ 13y agoWhy are you trying to judge them based on 8 data points when a better comparison is the article you're commenting on?
- officemonkey 13y agoAlso, he saved 8 dollars by using Amazon. That's enough for another CD.
- kree10 13y agoMentioning CDs reminds me that the price of physical CDs on Amazon in some cases has dipped below $0. For some CDs, Amazon throws in the MP3 download (with the usual cloud storage) for "free". The funny thing is, the price of the CD+MP3 is sometimes less than the MP3 alone, even with shipping. Check the Velvet Underground's back catalog for some examples.
- koudi 13y agoAmazon's Music is also essentially unavailable outside US (currently ~8 countries compared to ~120).
- mark_l_watson 13y agoI switched from iTunes to Amazon for music years ago, mostly on price. One thing I don't like: Amazon has local music players for PC, iPad, iPhone, and Android -- but not for OSX. On my MacBook air I need to use the web interface which fails if I am offline. I suppose I could use the downloader and put them in iTunes. I do like the idea of buying music, audible books, and Kindle books and always having them available. I think Amazon is miles ahead of Apple iTunes and Google Play.
- rismay 13y agoYou sure it's not 78% of the time it's cheaper every time?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- hclee 13y agoHere in Korean market, streaming service dominates. Many iPhone users have not even used iTunes. Why? $5/month music service gives you access to most K pops. Thats it. $5/month subscription for most musics. Depending on market conditions, a little lower priced downloading seems pointless But I use iTunes (iradio) as i have U.S. Account.
- vannevar 13y agoStreaming is going to dominate the US market, too. Between Netflix and Spotify, iTunes is in serious trouble. It's not clear to me that Apple has a viable response---iTV seems to be in limbo, and iTunes Match seems like window dressing. Apple bought some time for the old music publishing model but that time is running out.
- rsynnott 13y agoTo an extent, iTunes has done what it needed to do; it helped make iPods and then iPhones viable. By all reports, it's pretty low-margin (for a while, it was apparently negative margin), and was more about selling the devices than anything else.
- mrich 13y agoSpotify is very popular in Europe, I really wonder why people still buy albums when you can get access to a huge catalogue for a relatively small monthly fee. Of course some albums are not available but I guess it will improve over time.
- bsdetector 13y agoIt's also trivial to automatically rip streamed tracks (with song, artist, album info). It took about 5 min each to scrape info from rhapsody, rdio, spotify, etc or there are existing tools to do this. These people on "hacker" news concerned over price aren't very good hackers or are too milk-toast to be hackers. Maybe y'all need a few "how to rip music in Go" posts? Even with Amazon you are still throwing your money away buying music at $1/song.
- myko 13y agoI used Amazon's Music for a long time on Android before switching to Google Music. Their stuff was generally a lot cheaper, and still is - but their Android apps are terrible across the board, so I made the switch.
- gnicholas 13y agoThis may be true, but iTunes gift cards can often be had at a discount—I just picked up $100 in GC for $80. I've not seen the same for Amazon GCs, although there used to be small-dollar promotions back when Amazon was ramping up the business.
- roryokane 13y agoThe article mentions this iTunes gift card strategy, in the paragraph starting with “But if a shopper insists on buying music from iTunes exclusively…”
- JosephHatfield 13y agoI stopped buying music over a year ago after signing up for Spotify, and after copying over 500 CDs to AAC format files recently, I'm not sure I'll be buying much music after this.
- codex 13y agoAmazon has to compete on price because they don't own the device. They never recovered from the iPod disrupting their CD business. Actually, I don't think they know how to compete on anything else. Their entire MO is avoiding competition with other tech companies by entering business too unattractive for the power players. For example, digital media (books, music, movies) is a terrible business, because bits are the essence of commodity.
- jonknee 13y ago> They never recovered from the iPod disrupting their CD business. Considering they have large market share in both physical and digital music I would say they recovered just fine. Amazon has also sold a lot of iPods.
- dirkgently 13y ago> They never recovered from the iPod disrupting their CD business. What? Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't Amazon sell few more things than just audio CDs? Also, isn't it 2013, or is it just me?
- mwfunk 13y agoIt's just you, it's not 2013.
- epa 13y ago"Your margin is my opportunity" -Jeff Bezos
- iyulaev 13y agoIs anyone else bothered by the lack of lossless audio availability on Amazon and other music distributors? This has been a stumbling point for me. Why doesn't Amazon offer FLAC or similar? I can't imagine the bandwidth and storage requirements are beyond what they can (inexpensively) handle. For this reason I've been really excited about bandcamp. That and it makes it really easy for (actually) independent artists to distribute their music.
- zanny 13y agomp3s are good enough for most people. I'm included in that group - I don't perceive the difference between 128kbps mp3s, 96kbps opus, 320kbps mp3s, or flac (though below 128kbps mp3 I hear the difference). At least on my integrated sound cards (I got a creative x-fi card once to see if I noticed the difference on $120 speakers, I didn't). I also only really get $30 - 60 speakers that carry 25w and have some reasonable quality to them, but I'm not an audiophile. So my entire collection varies from 128kbps mp3s to vbr mp3s and a few flac files in there, but whenever I download something off bandcamp I get the vorbis 128kbps versions because I can't hear the difference. Amazon should at least make flac a non-default download option. Everyone having lossy copies of music isn't good for the long term preservation of said music.
- freerobby 13y agoYou will notice the difference if you ever want to move your music to a better format in the future (due to transcoding losses). With FLAC you would not have this problem.
- zanny 13y agoThis is true, I do eventually want to move it to opus if they ever resolve the random seek issues with the codec since it gets better compression ratios and more importantly is open. But I also figure my 60gb of mp3s would be at least 400gb or more as flac, though given how cheap storage space is that may not be an issue. I guess I should start trying to collect flac music after all!
- 13y ago
- eikenberry 13y agoPeople are paying for the convenience and ease of use of these services. Amazon because everyone knows it and it has good search capability. Apple/iTunes due to the nice integrated experience apple provides, from store to device. Apple provides the superior service and thus can command the higher price.
- angrycoder 13y agoI don't know how Apple has the 'integrated experience' advantage. When I buy mp3's on Amazon I can download them to my PC, leave them in the cloud and stream them over the web, or download/stream them to any iOS or Android device using their cloud app. Apple gives me similar features, but only if I stay in the iOS/OSX ecosystem. Last year, amazon put the mp3's for around 70% of the cd's I bought from them over the past 15 years into their cloud for free. When apple removed DRM from the iTunes store, they wanted me to pay over $300 to unlock my collection. Amazon also lets me upload my own collection into their cloud and gives me the same streaming and download capacity across any device just as if I had bought the songs from them. I don't see how Apple wins on price, features, or experience.
- testbro 13y agoIn a phrase: "does this just go into my iTunes then?". A large majority of Apple's customers presumably doesn't care about anything you mention, given by the simplicity of the iTunes model: you get music from the same place you listen to it and you put it on your iPod from there too. The strategy of "few things, well executed" seems to be working fairly well too.
- wanderr 13y agoHas anyone noticed that thanks to AutoRip, you can often more cheaply get MP3s by buying the physical CD than you could by buying the MP3s directly?
- wprl 13y agoBeatport is more expensive ~100% of the time but has better music.