Amazon’s Music Download Site is Cheaper Than iTunes 78% of the Time | Hacker News Reader

Amazon’s Music Download Site is Cheaper Than iTunes 78% of the Time

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112 pointsuladzislau100 comments

I 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...

You 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.

> 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.

You'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.

> 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.

> 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.

Honest 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?

I'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?

Provide a great experience.

Trying to explain to my parents how to get a music file from their browser downloads folder into iTunes would be challenging to say the least. However saying just click this button to Buy and it will be in your Recently Added playlist is much easier.

Perhaps it's a matter of taste but I was thinking yesterday that the iTunes app reminds of the old dial-in AOL.

What iTunes does is provide music from multiple publishers which you can buy with one click at which point the media is loaded onto all your players without requiring you to jump through hoops such as manually syncing file systems.

> iTunes invented modern online music distribution. I believe it was actually Napster, who invented modern distribution :)

Now seriously - iTunes is kinda OK-ish, but web purchase/download could only increase their customer base. Their whole ecosystem works nicely, but I believe that customers will soon require more open approach rather than tying everything to one platform.

you're forgetting that all of Apple's digital storefronts , online services exist for only one reason - as accessories and support systems to their hardware ( Macs and iGadgets ). The only reason iTunes on Windows exists is to increase the addressable market for iPods, iPhones and iPads ( not to increase the addressable market of the iTunes Store itself - but it comes as a side effect of the first one).

True, although such strict lock-in seems to be counter-productive. For example - I have iPad (and love reading on it), but I never buy books on iBooks Store. I use amazon instead, because I can easily strip DRM and convert to any format I want and read anywhere I want (should I ever buy different device). iBooks books are tied to apple devices for ever.

This strategy may work for now, but I don't think it's viable in a long term and apple always seemed to prefer bigger picture rather than pursue immediate profits.

It is long-term. Opening up iBooks to any device or just being available on the web would increase profits immediately. Building out the ecosystem is the long-term part.

I agree with my 2 siblings. Itunes served a purpose, but that's long gone. If they would at least allow direct downloads to their devices, I might have less gripes with them, but as it stands...

I must be misunderstanding, this works for me on my iphone

You mean Napster "invented" online [music] distribution.

I came here to make this very same comment; glad to see it had already been posted.

The pirate industry was light years ahead of anything the corporates were doing. All Apple did was convince the music labels to allow them to distribute their music digitally.

The digital download market has succeeded in spite of iTunes, not because of it.

There wasn't a market before Apple and there probably wouldn't be one today if Apple, or someone of equal clout, hadn't created that market.

> 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.

Oh, I don't have any animus against the player. While I preferred lighter weight players that support more formats and are easier to customize, foobar, classic winamp, and amarok, Apple definitely made some gains in usability, simplifying the experience for the commodity consumer.

I love it when they compete on features, I'm just depressed and frustrated by any company that tries to win through lock in.

It's an old quote now, but it still lines up pretty well with my feelings: "The paradigm of competition is a race:by rewarding the winner, we encourage everyone to run faster. When capitalism really works this way, it does a good job; but its defenders are wrong in assuming it always works this way. If the runners forget why the reward is offered and become intent on winning, no matter how, they may find other strategies--such as, attacking other runners. If the runners get into a fist fight, they will all finish late."

I understand why companies do these things, just as I understand why people steal or commit fraud. I just wish they wouldn't, that's all.

Almost 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.

iTunes 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.

> 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.

Well 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.

>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.

They'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.

"Amazon has no presence on TV"

Whatever do you mean? Amazon instant video is right up there with Hulu and Netflix for on-line content. There are apps on my iPhone and my Roku. iTunes can't say that.

Ah, I'm speaking from a UK perspective there. I'd forgotten they were doing TV stuff in the US. I don't think that's available here.

Amazon are quite active in the UK video market; they own LoveFilm, after all.

Edit: removed dupes. Sorry about that.

>No other platform/ecosystem is as straight-forward however

I laughed my ass off when two off my colleagues lost all of their music while trying to format their computer or phone.

That's what goes for straight forward nowadays I guess.

iTunes is a pretty low-margin service; it's really there to shift iPods and iPhones, not to make money as a store.

> either join the ecosystem and gain the advantages, or don't.

Yar - har - fiddle-dee-dee....

I 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?)

It's actually from this song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLMJpHihykI

Haha yup, the pirate in that video's name is Patchy the Pirate :)

It 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.

I 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.

It'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.

I'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.

I 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.

Why are you trying to judge them based on 8 data points when a better comparison is the article you're commenting on?

Also, he saved 8 dollars by using Amazon. That's enough for another CD.

Mentioning 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.

That is an awesome tip.

Now, if you pirated that mp3 track (with negative sale price), would that be "stealing"? :-)

But seriously: if you sell the CD, should you delete your MP3s?

My data is better than their data. There may be less of it, but it's mine, so it's better.

Your data shows you saved with amazon, what is your point?

That's all he's trying to show, he's not trying to show that it would save you money.

Because these 8 points are albums he actually bought. It could be that the albums that Amazon sell for cheaper are albums no one buys. By using his own purchases, he gets data that avoids this issue.

It improves it for music that he buys, not for music that people in general buy.

There was no attempt in the article to weight by volume, so his sample of albums is a good test of the claim.

If you open an MP3, speed it up in Audacity, and save it as an MP3, you are still re-encoding it and decreasing quality, which is what I assume you mean by "conversion".

After any processing step, you should save to a lossless format to avoid this. You can start with whatever format you want (AAC from iTunes and MP3 from Amazon are pretty indistinguishable in subjective quality.)

Better yet, use a portable player that can change playback speed on the fly while decoding. (many "DJ" apps, a hardware player than can run Rockbox, etc.)

Realistically, he's not going to notice the marginal quality loss when he's jogging.

That's a great solution. I run into an issue with Linux -- Itunes support is slipshod with WINE. Beyond moving to Windows or OSX, any suggestions?

I don't use it anymore, but back when I did, I believe Emusic would work well on Linux, particularly because it was all DRM-free.

This was several years ago, though.

I run into the issue of only being able to read from the device (so I can copy music with obfuscated filenames). But with writing to the device I've run into an issue. If I had the time (dissertating now) I'd figure it out, but until then a pre-packaged solution would be fantastic!

Is 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.

mp3s 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.

You 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.

This 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!

Count me in. It's absolutely ridiculous that CDs, which have existed for over 30 years already, still offer higher quality audio than you can generally buy digitally. It's a sad truth in general that if you want high quality digital media, you'll either have to buy and rip physical products yourself or resort to piracy - this is true for both audio and video, especially the latter - hell, with video you can barely even BUY anything digitally since it's all either streaming or files DRM up the bum (both of which are ultimately just renting).

In case of music, the Bandcamp model should really be the default - one price allows you to get the product in whatever common format you want, be that lossless FLAC or just bog-standard MP3. It would definitely make me buy a helluva lot more music than I currently do. (Though sadly most of the music I listen to would probably still be completely unavailable to me legally thanks to the wonders of region locking, which is another one of those damn things that makes digital media way worse than what it could potentially be.)

Amazon's Music is also essentially unavailable outside US (currently ~8 countries compared to ~120).

Probably 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.

Those 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.

Amazon 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.

> 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.

> 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?

It's just you, it's not 2013.

I 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.

Here 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.

Streaming 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.

To 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.

Spotify 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.

It'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.

People 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.

I 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.

In 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.

I 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.

Has 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?

This 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.

The article mentions this iTunes gift card strategy, in the paragraph starting with “But if a shopper insists on buying music from iTunes exclusively…”

I 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.

IMO, 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.

Do you mean specifically for iOS? Amazon has a mp3 app for Android and has its cloud player that works on other devices as well.

I use cloud player daily

Amazon 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?

Spotify. "Geeks" use foobar2000 or rythmbox.

A 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.

Urgh: windows. What do the OSX geeks who don't much like iTunes use?

Cog is decent enough. It's no foobar2000 though

I use Clementine, which is a fork of Amarok before it went 2.0. It's pretty spiffy.

http://www.clementine-player.org/

"Amazon cloudplayer" can play MP3s you've purchased on your phone, on the web, or on a windows/mac client. It can also be used to purchase new songs or as a media player of other music (from any source) on your pc or phone.

Cool. How is the quality of music on the Cloud Player?

It's really good in my experience. Though the UX is far inferior to Google Music (which is generally more in line with iTunes as far as cost).

Amazon does have an iOS app as well as Android and PC.

Beatport is more expensive ~100% of the time but has better music.

"Your margin is my opportunity" -Jeff Bezos

You sure it's not 78% of the time it's cheaper every time?

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