Try Your Hands At Music Download Competition

Look out iTunes! The Amazon.com mp3 store is approaching with a head of steam. And judging by their latest ad campaign, they are prepared for a back alley brawl. You see, unlike most online stores, Amazon's download service works within iTunes and iPods. In fact the Amazon download service have also begun utilizing cheaper prices and aggressive advertisements in order to give the Apple giant a run for its money.

If you own an iPod (or any mp3 player for that matter), you really should give the Amazon download service a look-see. Knowing that they would be fighting an uphill battle from the start, Amazon decided to provide lower prices that reward the repeat customer. Three factors have allowed the website to offer a desirable alternative and they all deal with pricing and packaging.

To start, almost all songs are priced at 89 cents, as opposed to 99 cents on iTunes. While the savings aren't drastic, purchasing from Amazon is the equivalent of getting a free song from iTunes for every ten you buy. And at the end of the day, money is money; if you are a habitual spender on iTunes, your interests are better served via Amazon at this point. Granted, the library is not as impressive, but most of the popular acts from iTunes are available on Amazon.

Secondly, Amazon has chosen not to get greedy when pricing older artists or albums with only a few songs. For instance, in the past month, I purchased two albums off the Amazon store: Sticky Fingers, by the Rolling Stones and Wish You Were Here, by Pink Floyd. A Stones album will run you at least ten dollars on iTunes, but almost all of the band's records came to me at only eight dollars at the Amazon store. Wish You Were Here, on the other hand, costed less than five dollars. The album has only five tracks, so instead of pricing it as an album, Amazon store chose to charge it as if they were offering five individual songs.

It is these minor details that will allow Amazon store to stay in the hunt with iTunes. Also, when you consider the high profile ad campaign with Pepsi (five bottle caps constitutes a free song), Amazon download service is getting its brand out into the mainstream conscious. While no one will probably ever fully overtake iTunes, it is nice to see a competitor that will prevent a monopolized market and keep prices down.