I can't stand itunes and I found the Amazon downloading process easy and painless. Amazon all the way for me.

This must be all part of the music industry's plan to get me to buy less music.

I lol'd for a good 2 minutes. Thank you for that.

Also, I always thought that Amazon had better bitrate. Did iTunes recently upgrade their quality? Something about tiered purchases and quality options?

I have always purchased Amazon because I have a Sansa Clip for a solid-state workout player, which rated infinitely higher than the iPod Shuffle in terms of sound quality. The choice was either to burn songs and re-enter them into iTunes (I love the extra work involved to play songs I already own!), or simply go to Amazon. The choice was pretty easy.

Everyone in the music industry could learn a few things from Trent Reznor. So far he seems like the only one who has gotten it right.

All these price hikes will do is drive consumers to illegally obtain their music.

iTunes can officially kiss my business goodbye. At least for the $1.29 songs. $0.99 and $.069 I will gladly pay.

This seems like a dumb move for Apple if Amazon is keeping their prices the same...

@Blinky987: [blogs.consumerreports.org]

Guess Amazon got on that one quick. Assume it has to be record companies? T_T

@Blinky987: I should have noted that the new "iTunes Plus" is a higher bitrate. Before now, iTunes' tracks were lower quality than Amazon's.

I've edited the first paragraph to note this. Thanks!

The only reason to pay 99 cents for a track before is because 99 cents is less than a dollar. Anything less than a dollar doesn't exist - in my mind I can complete theoretically infinite $1 transactions. Now that $1.29, an ugly, asymmetrical, real number is used I will never buy anything ever again. Not that I'd pay for music in the first place - stealing music is so easy that I'd do it if I was a billionaire.

"Ars Technica points out that this may be an attempt to spur album sales"

This is completely in the hands of the labels. Why would Apple want to overhaul their pricing system after all this time, when it's gotten them so much goodwill? They wouldn't. It was part of the terms of having the whole store be DRM free.

99 cents for a single song is hardly "artificially low"...

Also Boom Boom Pow could be the worst song ever.

Eh, I don't see it as a problem. The $1.29 tracks will likely eventually drop to .99 anyway.

Not that I use iTunes, actually, so this is probalby why I am not bothered by the change.

Unfortunately, Amazon raised their prices too but not on nearly as much music. And, Amazon lately has had fantastic deals on new releases - $4.99 apiece for the entire Keith Urban, Rascal Flatts and Jason Aldean albums, which is an awesome deal. It made me download the Amazon app and use it last night. It even adds the songs automatically to your iTunes. Follow the @amazonmp3 guy on Twitter and you can get those deals.

Artificially low according to who? the recording industry? I would say .99 is artificially high considering it is an infinite good.

The problem with Amazon is that if you lose your music, you can't get it back. So make backup copies.

@Christie Porter: Amazon has raised some songs to 1.29 as well, though it doesn't look like they raised as many as Apple.

I was under the impression that the variable pricing (which Apple disdains actually) was what they had to give up for the labels to completely drop DRM.

Not a sarcastic question, I really want to know:

Why use iTunes? Why not Amazon instead? As far as I know Amazon has a bigger selection, less drm, and lower prices. And possibly better quality. I don't buy online myself, still CD's for me (I'm old), but if I did, what's the advantage of iTunes? I mean, are they really offering an inferior service at HIGHER prices?

"What we're saying is, for most consumers Amazon is the better alternative at this moment."

I'm a huge fan of Amazon's MP3 service and despise the iTunes app, but yet I don't agree with your statement.

If you know what you want and know how to use a computer, you're probably right, Amazon is a better deal.

But iTunes does a great job holding your hand and walking you through the process. It's also much better at searching for music when you're not entirely sure what you're looking for. Overall iTunes' interface is much more polished and simpler.

Essentially, iTunes is a vending machine to Amazon's warehouse store.

@Spero: Because Apple doesn't have publishing rights to the world's music, the music labels do?
And, because people were SO upset with DRM mandated by the labels (see above), and the pound of flesh the music labels demanded to ditching DRM (which Apple always loathed) was to let them offer variable pricing.
So, whiners, stop ur whining: you got what you wanted. Suck it up!

That said, it appears that most of the hawt hawt hawt $1.29 singles are of the Jonas Brothers/Hanna Montana manufactured pop acts. So if you have taste - or if your kids have taste - you'll do fine.

@ADismalScience: Would you mind giving me a non-existent 99 cents 1010102 times? Baby needs a new pair of shoes.

I've always been an Apple user but I cannot STAND iTunes. Their music selection is crap, and I am fairly convinced that the software ate my hard drive when it died a few weeks ago.

I still buy CDs, borrow friend's CDs to downloand and hunt for RAR files online.

Whoa - Chris is quite flustered over the naughty bits of Lady GaGa.
I smell Lady GaGa Lifetime Fan Club membership in his near future!

@milrtime83: Yeah, I always thought .50 to .75 were the ideal target for downloaded music considering the lower cost of distributing the music.

@tc4b: GMFish makes a good argument above, which is that iTunes is almost 100% seamless as a shopping experience--basically a vending machine is how he puts it. For a lot of "don't make me work at this" customers, that's why to go that route.

I for one, love iTunes, and don't care if prices are rising on popular tunes. I don't listen to the teeny-bopper crap that is most likely the higher price stuff. Remember a lot of older songs will probably be $0.69.
iTunes is the number 1 music app for a reason- it takes care of everything- storage, downloading, loading onto your player, etc, and it works well. Apple engineering is second to none (I will admit sometimes they dumb it down a little too much though).

@tc4b:
There is no reason other then itunes is from Apple. And everyone knows if Apple made it, it must be better than the competition.

You still can't use AAC files on anything but an ipod, though, right?

All of my faves still seem to be .99, probably because I have old and quirky music tastes, so I'm happy.

@tc4b: A bunch of people gave me iTunes gift cards a couple of years ago for Christmas and I still have $4 and change left, so when I want to buy music, I go there.

Obviously this doesn't happen all that often.

I go back and forth between Amazon and iTunes, although I use iTunes more because of how I have gift card money to spend there. I only use Amazon if it has an album I can get cheaper from them instead of iTunes (example: I bought "It's Not Me It's You" for $3.99; iTunes wanted $9.99), but I may very well start using them more if the songs I want are cheaper there than at iTunes and use iTunes for music video purchases only.

I think people shouldn't be getting mad at Apple and the other music download sites. Yes, I am a Mac owner, but various media outlets have said that the labels wanted Apple to increase prices for a couple of years now.

I still prefer to buy the CDs for $12 or whatever and rip them myself. I choose the bitrate, no big deal if my hard drive(s) fails, and you get the album art and inserts.

No one else has pointed out that zero, or next to zero, $0.69 tracks have been spotted in the store yet. The labels LIED through their teeth when they promised "many more 0.69 tracks than 1.29 tracks" a few months ago when this change was announced -- Everyone who believed them has just been made a fool of.

Those F*%$ers can never do anything without BEING EVIL.

The original reason they gave Amazon the right to sell DRM-free while forcing Apple to keep DRM was to stick it to Apple because they hate Apple -- presumably because Apple refused to consider "variable" (HIGH) pricing.

Now they finally relent on the DRM issue, but (A) they're still sticking it to Apple (and Apple customers) by raising prices less on Amazon than on iTunes. And (B) they LIED OUTRIGHT that they had any intention of selling songs for less than $0.69.

I'm going on 2 years RIAA free, you lying f*&%ks. I can keep doing this forever. How long can your businesses last without money?

@dragonfire81:

Amazon raised prices this morning.

@Chris Walters: So you're paying for a more pleasant shopping experience? I can see that, and I'm sure there are times/places in my life where I do it myself.

@tc4b: Point-by-point, it's easier. :)

Selection: Subjective, based entirely on what you're looking for. Short of getting a raw inventory count from each store I don't think it's possible to really weigh it. Needless to say, both are "pretty damn big."

DRM: If iTunes hasn't phased DRM out of their music catalog by now, it will happen shortly as per their announcement in January.

Quality: This is determined mostly by how the encoding is done, not necessarily the resulting format. So *generally* speaking, a 256kbps .m4a file (iTunes) will be better than a 256kbps .mp3 file (Amazon.)

@morganlh85: The new DRM-free AAC files play fine under Linux, for me. Anything that can play MPEG4 audio should work with them.

@GMFish: Ever put money into a vending machine and have nothing come out?

@Blinky987: Fortunately the decision to take iTunes DRM-free has made this easier. I've found I can now just copy the AAC files out of my iTunes directory and play them on anything that can play MPEG4 audio. You could also transcode them to MP3, if your player can only play that. No more burning required!

@morganlh85: You can use these AAC files on anything that supports AAC. I know more than just the iPod supports AAC these days, but not everything. The older DRM'd files only work on the iPod, though.

Also: despite what some trolls might think, "AAC" does not stand for "Apple Audio Codec" or anything similar. It's "Advanced Audio Codec", which is part of the MPEG4 standard.

@GMFish: There are six podcasts broadcast by three different publishers on six websites, and I want them downloaded and ready to listen to - but not the reruns, which happen - seamlessly.
I'm listening to Bang A Gong and since it's a goofy day and I want music similar to it, I want songs - some '60s, some House, with a couple Iggy Pop tunes thrown in for laughs - to be insta-mixed at the push of a button. Oh, that relies on what millions of other listeners, who have Bang A Gong , and equally disparate tunes in their library, have played (regression analysis, for the statistically astute).
Since my mp3 player has a gorgeous screen and I play tunes while driving, I need the album artwork downloaded, automatically.
I also like having playlists that are automatically created that highlight recently added CDs. And ones mixed by (fill in my favorite 3 DJs). And ones that have "kittens" in the song title. All done dynamically.
And of course, all of these things have to seamlessly sync with all three of my MP3 players, or what's the point?

Let's see: Amazon let's me... Download music. Great.

Once you start having a decent tunes collection, managing it is key. And iTunes allows me to enjoy my music in unexpected ways impossible with a cobbled-together Rube Goldberg patched-together mishmash of unintegrated parts.

YMMV, of course. :)

@tc4b: Because iTunes is a one-stop shop. I sync my iPod to iTunes, update my library and browse for new music automatically when I plug in my iPod. iTunes checks for new music that I might enjoy, and I can also buy TV shows and put them on my iPod. Maybe I'm not seeing it, or Amazon's changed their process, but I don't think I can put video I get from Amazon on my iPod.

@vjmurphy: Seriously?! Why would they do that?

@morganlh85: DRM-free means DRM-free. You can find a pretty comprehensive list of Not-iPod devices that support the AAC/M4A format at [www.anythingbutipod.com]

@Trai_Dep: What I don't like about iTunes is, because they're so worried about people copying music, I can't sync my iPod to multiple machines. This kind of puts the kibosh on downloading podcasts at work, so I use software other than iTunes to manage my iPod.

@RonDiaz: "Saved by Zero" didn't make your top spot?

Actually- as much as I think the music industry people are idiots, this is a good move.

A lot of back-catalog songs SHOULD sell for .49 or even less. Say I had an interest in the music of, say, John Denver. Most of what you would want would be on a hits package, but what if I could own his whole back-catalog for .29 or .49 a song? I might bite. Hopefully, this will mean they'll start doing just that - offering completists catalogs for a low price (i.e. 19.99 buys you the complete Bob Welch).

PS Bonus pts for knowing who Bob Welch is.

@pecan 3.14159265: Right, like many Apple products and services, it's a beautiful, integrated pleasure to use. Even if it's a few cents more (but it doesn't even look like it is).

@Trai_Dep: AFAIK, Amazon downloader puts the music in your iTunes library. It's not designed to be a player. It's designed to facilitate the transaction.

@David Brodbeck: iTunes can eat my ass by offering to take the DRM off my songs for money.

@GMFish: I would completely agree with you. The only reason I don't have a superior iRiver (esp the ones that had OLED displays) is because of iTunes. However, I'm not buying songs on iTunes, and I'm certainly not using it as a background player when I'm gaming because it's a system resource destroyer of Death Star properties.