2008-02-16

Amazon is not killing the iTunes Store any time soon.

I have finally started clearing out our CD collection. There are a lot of discs in here that we never listen to, and others that we bought just for one song. (Remember when that was your only option?) Half Price Books offers a decent price for used CDs with little hassle, so that has been my outlet of choice so far. The proceeds from selling discs will go to buying individual tracks to replace more CDs, though I’ve found fewer than ten songs so far that I feel need to be replaced.

Not every song on CD is available at the iTunes Store, and getting rid of plastic mass outweighs brand loyalty in this case. Amazon’s MP3 store got a lot of press a few months back for offering DRM-free music at a price matching or beating Apple’s FairPlay-protected files. I figure that’s a good alternative, right?

One of the discs I’m looking to replace is a compilation of songs from movie soundtracks, produced by Blockbuster. The only track worth keeping is Vince Gill’s “Ophelia” from the Mel Gibson-Jodie Foster flick Maverick. The iTunes Store doesn’t have it, so let’s check the Amazon MP3 store.

Searching on “vince gill” is easy enough, but returns 285 results, more than I’m willing to sift through. Any way to refine the search? Not that I can see. Okay, I’ll sort by song title and just page down to the “O”s. Clicking on the “Song Title” column header doesn’t work. Off to the right, I notice a dropdown that says “Sort by”. That looks promising. My options are “Relevance”, “Bestselling”, “Price: Low to High”, “Price: High to Low”, “Avg. Customer Review”, and “Release Date”. No “Song Title”, no “Album”, apparently no “Artist” (assuming I searched on just a last name or the name of a song or album).

And like that, I suspect that I won’t be shopping the Amazon MP3 store again any time soon.