It’s a good week when the #1 album on the charts is by none other than deserving band, Arcade Fire. Eminem came in a close second but The Suburbs is just too hot to be be pushed down right now.

Many fans are certainly happy about this as well as other Merge Records artists such as Spoon, who congratulated Arcade Fire via Twitter. Besides the fact that we’ve been waiting a long time for this third studio album to come out and that awesome Madison Square Garden concert YouTube stream, there are a lot of factors that could have helped the Montreal-based band out. If you’re one for bargain prices, your purchase of their album on Amazon for $3.99 may have helped boost their rank on the charts – but was it worth it?

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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.

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Amazon is partnering with Tunecore to provide any artist with on-demand CD printing and distribution for $31 a year. For that lowly sum, they will handle the creation of a 10-track album, passing all other costs to the buyer.

Finally, a service that will remove the middle-man and make it easier for artists to provide albums for fans on Amazon and iTunes, without the exorbitant cost normally associated with CD manufacturing.

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In case you haven’t heard yet, April has been the first month for iTunes’ new three-tier pricing to be put into effect. Yes, iTunes has sold songs for amounts a bit less or more than $0.99 before, but you now see songs generally priced at $0.69, $.099, or $1.29. Record companies are hoping their ability to determine the 30 cent differences will help sales by setting older or less popular songs at $0.69 and their brand new hits at $1.29.

All songs on iTunes are also now free of Digital Rights Management (DRM), which means songs can be bought once and played on unlimited iPods and computers without dealing with copy protection.

$1.29 isn’t that much more when you think about it at first, but does it effect your decisions in regards to where you buy your music in the long run? Amazon.com is still selling their individuals songs at $0.99 at the most, and they’ve been free of DRM for over a year. The Orlando Sentinel actually suggested a program that allows you to easily compare iTunes and Amazon prices before you buy a song, but do you care that much? iTunes is the leading music retailer – Are you going to stop using it when all your music is already in an iTunes library? Let us know and vote below!

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With all the music streaming and download services available, it’s difficult to decide which one to use. iTunes recently introduced their tiered pricing, but Amazon is selling top-tier songs at a cheaper price. Even though iTunes controls the download market, fans looking to buy music might be enticed by Amazon’s price drop.

On the free streaming front, Spotify released libspotify Tuesday night, which allows third-party developers to write applications for the service, and YouTube, though reported to have blocked “premium” videos in the UK and Germany, still provides most music for free, through user-made videos.

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Some of us may never get lucky enough to interview our favorite musicians and ask them those burning questions like, “What CDs can’t you seem to get enough of?”

Well, no worries – Amazon‘s got you covered.

Apparently, Amazon has implored musicians with products on their website to provide consumers with lists of recommended music and top influences. The website’s new ‘Music You Should Hear‘ section, which already features a lengthy list, has set out to prove that artists really do care about connecting with fans.

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Coda.fm is the newest torrent search engine site that separates itself from the pack. By hosting only music related torrents, and offering the option to actually buy the album of what you’re downloading, the site is looking to revamp the common notion that torrents are the internet’s dark secret, hidden in the depths of questionable advertising and members-only access.

On every torrent page, Coda.fm provides a link for you to purchase the album on Amazon. This may seem ridiculous at first, for why would somebody buy an album they are downloading? In fact, the feature was requested by users in the Feedback section of the site, and recent research shows that, contrary to traditional beliefs, file sharers truly buy music.

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Grand Theft Auto IV developer Rockstar Games has changed from Amazon’s mp3 store to Apple’s iTunes for their ZiT service, a feature that allows players to purchase songs from the game’s seventeen in-game radio stations.

iTunes will be implemented with “The Lost and the Damned,” an upcoming downloadable content (DLC) package for GTA IV, which will update five of the game’s virtual radio stations with new tracks from artists including Busta Rhymes and Funkmaster Flex.

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