iTunes Versus Amazon

It's a colossal battle: iTunes versus Amazon. Apple's iTunes was the first to the party; Amazon was certainly a latecomer. Similar in features, price, and functionality, both offer extensive catalogs, "exclusive" artists, instant downloads, and all the other benefits a solid music download service would offer.

Which one should YOU be using? That's the real question.

Used to be, if you owned an iPod (and who didn't?), you had to use iTunes to purchase music. Certainly, there were other places from which you could purchase digitally-encoded music, but the integration between the iPod and iTunes made them a perfect pair.

That is no longer the case. Amazon's little helper utility (a free download) is fully-compatible with iTunes and the iPod file system. It works with the iPod and iTunes rather than against it.

Individual songs at the iTunes store are priced at 99 cents. Amazon's prices end at 99 cents and go lower; the song's price is tied to its popularity on that day. Consequently, the songs that most people want on any given day are cheaper at Amazon than they are on iTunes.

Albums are similar, too. The standard iTunes album price is $9.99, but you can find albums less and more than that price. Amazon is the same. However -- and this is a big one -- Amazon runs frequent specials like "50 albums for $5" and $3.99 specials on new releases all the time. For example, I downloaded Keith Urban's "Defying Gravity" on its release day for $3.99.

The other really big advantage that Amazon has over iTunes is the software, or lack thereof. The aforementioned applet that integrates Amazon with the iPod file system is nice to have but by no means necessary.

On the other hand, if you want to purchase music through the iTunes store, you have to have iTunes software installed on your PC or Mac.

This is a big downer.

I remember Steve Jobs saying that Apple developed the best Windows software ever and he was referring to iTunes. He was wrong. iTunes is very non-intuitive to use, it's sometimes buggy, and it's feature-limited.

Another HUGE factor on Amazon's side is gift cards. Yes, gift cards. I buy A TON of stuff with Amazon gift cards that are given to me by friends, family, and strangers (well, not really). I also get a lot of gift cards through CoinStar (I trade in all my loose change every few months in return for 100 percent of the value in Amazon gift cards).

If I get an Amazon gift card, I can use it for a number of things. If I get an iTunes gift card, I'm limited to buying music.

This really isn't a "proper" shortcoming because iTunes is a music store and Amazon is a superstore that sells nearly everything. Apple could, however, modify the way they do things and, at the very least, allow you to use Apple gift cards for iTunes Store purchases (if they do, set me straight).

Oh, one more thing: Up until just recently, Amazon had a HUGE advantage -- at least to me -- because it's files were not protected with Digital Rights Management; Apple had always protected its files. Plus, Apple's songs were encoded at 128kpbs whereas Amazon's have always been encoded at 256kbps, though the sound quality was always negligible, in my opinion.

However, Apple recently removed the onerous copyright-protection scheme and this issue is no longer a decided disadvantage to iTunes.