No, I don’t want to install the Amazon MP3 Downloader

Sometime last week, I read that the Amazon MP3 store would now be selling DRM-free music from Warner, leaving Sony/BMG as the last hold-out among the major record labels.

Pretty cool, I thought, and decided that, having railed so much against the general crappiness of legitimate online purchase options, I ought to try buying some MP3′s from Amazon.

Cue circus music.

To begin with, it was not particularly easy to find stuff I wanted to buy. The default is to send the user to an “MP3 Songs” interface. Okay, fine—presumably, the majority of consumers are looking to buy individual tracks. However, at least make it easy to buy an album if that’s what I want to do.

I had settled on Unknown Pleasures by Joy Division, as the version of that I currently have is assembled from tracks of varying quality dating back to the heady days of Napster. The first time I searched for “Joy Division”, the only albums that showed up in the left-hand column were a few import compilations and an album of covers.

When I tried again a few days later, both Unknown Pleasures and Closer showed up, so I clicked the “Buy MP3 Album” button, only to get this:

A few problems:

1. I don’t have Windows XP, Vista, or Mac OSX.
2. Even if I did, why the hell do I want to install an extra piece of software just to download some files?

Alright, I see it says that if I’d rather not install the Amazon MP3 Downloader, I can purchase individual songs without it. Does it give me a link to go straight to the track listing? No, my only option is to cancel my purchase, which dumps me back to the main MP3 Downloads page, from which I have to do another search.

Okay, whatever. I search for “unknown pleasures” (that has something of a Hellraiser-ish ring to it, no?), click the album image, and get to a page where I can purchase all the individual songs on the album. Then, looking over 22 tracks, each costing $0.99, I do some quick math and realize that buying all the tracks individually will run me close to TEN DOLLARS MORE than buying the album.

At this point, I gave up.

I bought the Radiohead album directly from their website a few weeks ago. It ran me around ten bucks (my choice), and I got it in a .zip file via FTP without having to install anything. I understand that Amazon may feel that the average user would be confused by a compressed archive. That being said, it makes no sense at all to force customers to install extra software to do something as simple as downloading files, especially given that every web browser in the world has FTP built in.

Furthermore, how do you justify charging nearly twice as much for the same amount of stuff?

I will grudgingly admit that Amazon MP3 store is a step up from the various label-sponsored efforts that have come and gone over the last five or six years. And, depressing though it may be, I’d imagine that the vast majority of consumers still have not the faintest clue what DRM is or how it might impact their ability to use and enjoy the media they purchase.

So, this feature is an improvement, and it gets us a bit closer to the online equivalent of a music store that you can walk into and purchase media that will play on any device. Nonetheless, given that Amazon would have had to actively work to make it suck more than the services that have previously been available, that’s not saying much. When it comes to providing tangible goods, Amazon is one of my favorite retailers. It’s a shame that when they deal in digital downloads (MP3′s, the Kindle, their atrocious Unbox service), they apparently remove their brain and put it in a drawer.