Who’s Better: Amazon or iTunes?

It’s a common question: what service is better for downloading music: iTunes?  Amazon.com?  Some other service we’ve never heard of?  It turns out that the two 800-pound gorillas really are the best, so we thought we’d put these two head to head and see where they stack up and where they take a punch to the chin.

And, no, we will not be comparing them to torrents.  Torrents are like one-night-stands: you can get whatever you want if you know where to look, but you’ll probably have some shameful virus following you around for months afterward.

Ease of Use

These both seem to be the same on the face of it: you search for a track, put the track in your cart or pay for it with One-Click service, and it downloads instantly.  But there is one very big difference.

Amazon doesn’t require you to use a program unless you buy an album, which is an annoying little quirk; fortunately, you can just buy individual songs from your web browser.  Sure, they want you to use their “Amazon Downloader” for everything, but it’s like Ringo Starr‘s post-Beatles career; inoffensive, but you don’t need it most of the time and it doesn’t stand out.  iTunes absolutely requires you to use the iTunes program, which means opening it, waiting for it to load, and then buying your track.  But an iTunes download is instantly added to your library with all the proper information, while an Amazon track might need to be added.

Winner: Amazon.  Especially with netbooks and tablets becoming all the rage, the last thing we need is another program open on the desktop.  Amazon even works with iTunes.  Better to just do it innocuously and quietly, or not do it all.  Again, like Ringo Starr’s post-Beatles career.

Selection

We were going to break this down, but then we looked at the numbers and decided it was just too cruel to pretend Amazon had a chance.

Winner: iTunes.  11 million songs, plus a million podcasts, plus dozens of radio stations.  Amazon has “only” nine million songs.  But, worth remembering, as time passes this advantage might shrink or even go away, just like Britney Spears’ sanity.

Restrictions

Most people just want to listen to the music, but they’ve never known the pain of DRM.  DRM, or digital rights management, basically exists to keep you from pirating software.  It also happens to keep you from doing things like removing music from your iPod, making CDs, and otherwise trampling your consumer rights, which is not exactly something the music industry has ever been concerned with, but they really got unsubtle with this.  Fortunately, the consumer beat the music industry, and all downloads are free of this crap.  Well, mostly.

Apple has restrictions on CDs and streaming that were probably written by Kafka as a joke: you can only burn the same playlist seven times, but you can burn any song on a disc an unlimited number of times; you can only stream music to five different computers in the space of twenty-four hours; and so on.

Amazon’s restrictions?  None.  Zip, zero, nada, once you buy the track you can do with it as you please.

Winner: Amazon by a country mile.  We can do what we want with the music, whenever we want to.  iTunes just can’t keep up.

Formats

Just as important as restrictions are the actual format.  We’re going to subject you to boring audio talk, so we’ll put that in a blockquote so your eyes don’t glaze from boredom, since 90% of humanity doesn’t care about this (stereo nerds take note):

Both formats are “lossy”, meaning that some of the frequencies of the music are lost.  As a result, it won’t have quite as rich of a sound as a lossless format, such as AIFF.  This is a tradeoff because the compression allows the song files to be tiny, whereas AIFFs are freaking enormous.

The short version: Amazon uses MP3, while Apple uses the more advanced AAC.  Only trained professionals can really tell the difference.

Winner: Amazon.  Most technology can play back AAC, but all technology can play back MP3.

Pricing

On a song by song basis, there’s not much contest; both mostly have ninety-nine cent tracks with the occasional $1.29 track, with none of those fabled seventy-nine cent tracks anywhere to be found.

But for album sales?  The price difference is dramatic, with Amazon ranging between $5 and $12, and iTunes going all the way up to $15.  The lowest we found on iTunes was $4.  For an EP.  From the “Jonah Hex” soundtrack.

Winner: On a song-by-song basis, it’s a tie, but on an album basis, Amazon all the way.

Conclusion

Amazon’s the service of choice; fewer restrictions, better prices, easier to use, the only downside being the lack of podcasts and the lesser selection.  iTunes makes a great archive for your music and its access to podcasts is second to none, but you might as well skip right over the iTunes store and head straight down the Amazon.

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