First, competition is a good thing.

However, dissemination of bad information is not.

Back in April (5 months ago), Apple went DRM-free for part of their online catalog. If this didn't include your favorite songs, go place blame properly: on the record labels.

For any song that isn't yet DRM-free on iTunes, there's multiple legal work-arounds for eliminating the DRM. The best known method is to follow iTune's procedures to burn the song onto a CD-R and then re-import it. More to follow.

As such, Amazon's service isn't particularly profound in terms of product differentiation, because there isn't really any. Sure, its sometimes a bit cheaper, but convenience is worth 50 cents to many folks.

Give Amazon a year, then revisit.

-hh

Farhad writes:

When I pointed out that you're ruining your songs this way you say that the distortion is only minimal.

I'm over age 30, so I can no longer hear the difference. But if you're still young and fussy in regards to quality, then I suggest that you go buy analog vinyl, because back when I was young, I could clearly hear the difference between the best digital and vinyl (on the right gear). Hope you're willing to spend the $20K for Class A tube amps.

... I still don't get why you like this idea -- you've still got to burn and then rip your music in order to break it out of FairPlay, which you don't have to do with unrestricted MP3s. Don't you see some added benefit in that?

Absolutely, positively YES.

Because...Where's your backup copy when your HD fails?

That's why burning a CD is a necessity, regardless of where you got your music from.

From this perspective, the inconvenience of re-importing to DRM-strip is relatively trivial, so why allow it to even bother you? In fact, you don't even need to re-import right away: wait until your HD fails or there's some other reason to do it.

Of course, if you believe that you're immune from hardware failures, you have bigger problems than merely DRM. :-)

-hh

Techies dislike DRM on the principle of the thing, not because it actually presents meaningful barriers. Indeed, the fact that DRM presents no meaningful barriers and is simply an inconvenience for the consumer is a big part of the argument against it.

You, me, and Steve Jobs are all in agreement.

...right now Amazon is superior to iTunes in just about every quantifiable way, and that unlike iTunes, Amazon is entirely DRM-free. As a matter of principle, Amazon is better.

Okay, but wasn't that "principle" effectively compromised by Amazon being unable to get all the record companies to go along with the non-DRM thing, to the effect that while their catalog is technically DRM-free, it also happens to be much smaller than the mixed-DRM catalog over at Apple?

If you dig the iTunes interface, that's your prerogative, but myself I'd rather have a simple browser-based store than a proprietary closed-source standalone program…

A solution that was probably made necessary not because Apple really wanted to do it that way, but because the Content Owners (record laels) were insistant on having DRM.

Mind you, I find the speculation that Amazon's current offerings are subsidized price- and consumer-rights-wise by labels hoping to establish a viable iTunes competitor convincing. Of course, this seems merely like an additional reason to get while the getting's good...I won't complain about an opportunity to exploit their moment of desperation for all it's worth…

In other words, you're willing to likely sacrifice your long term well-being in order to save 50 cents a track today. YMMV, but I would call that "Myopia".

Oh, and transcoding your MP3s into audio CDs for backup purposes is just asinine and a waste of data storage (unless you're one of those stick-in-the-muds that still use CD-audio only players, of course). Backing up your data is a good thing, backing up your data in a format that takes up 10x the space and requires you to constantly swap discs is silly and framing the additional inconvenience as somehow a "perk" for iTunes is delusional. Copy your MP3 collection onto a few DVD-Rs or an external hard drive or something.

Sorry, you missed the real point here:

The CD burning technique merely illustrates ONE simple technique that can be done by anyone.

It doesn't deny that there can be better ways of accomplishing either task that may be preferred by more skilled computer user.

The fallacy here is unfortunately all too common: it is the assumption that everyone else is as computer-savvy as we happen to be. Unfortunately, it is all too easy for us to forget the limitations of the end user audience.

-hh