iTunes Still Number 1 Music Vendor; Amazon? Gaining Some Ground

Interesting, in that Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Amazon, and Target are among the biggest sellers of iPods other than Apple.

What was it that Karl Marx said of capitalists selling rope to communists?

In selling iPods, are these retailers contributing to the strength of their competition?

Robert Brown: If Amazon can sell songs that work on iPods, they arent strengthening their competitor.

Now, if Amazon manufactured and sold a competing music player (which they dont) that would be a different story.

Amazon turns a profit on selling iPods and selling music through their own store.

What your saying is like "Best Buy is strengthening their competitor HP because they sell HP computers"...

Amazon will keep moving up. They are the biggest and the first major site to sell MP3 format songs.

Itunes and its DRM songs is lame and soon more people will discover how much better the Amazon offer is.

"But I have yet to buy an MP3 from Amazon mainly because I haven’t run into anything I wanted to buy digitally that I couldn’t already get from iTunes."

I made the switch to iTunes a few months back because of the DRM restrictions that still exist on so much iTunes music. The DRM may have fallen by the wayside in the case of some label, but I have to say I got hooked on the Amazon.com experience.

- Superb download experience and transfer into iTunes. About as seamless as you can get without actually buying in iTunes.

- Prefer the Amazon.com website, recommendations and community. They merchandise better than anyone online. iTunes still sucks, frankly, from an editorial and merchandising experience. It's an ecommerce site out of 1999.

What about user experience? This is by far the most important reason I use iTunes, it's far superior to anything else out there.

Because of iTunes' DRM on mp3, I have yet to buy one from them even though I've been using iTunes for about 3 years now and even thought they're beginning to sell mp3's w/o DRM and have bigger selections.

The last couple of years, I've been buying up a lot of used CDs and recently started buying mp3's from Amazon and I LOVE THEM!!! If I don't already have tons of music on my iPod, I'd buy more mp3s from Amazon! And yes, I'd only buy mp3s from AMAZON!!

Amazon sells MP3s, unlike Apple's DRM-infested files from the iTunes store.

In other words, have fun de-authorizing your computer and iPod when you switch to a new one, to avoid losing all your tunes.

That's the Amazon edge, not CDs. Although strong customer relationships and publisher relationships doesn't hurt.

Why are Zune sales not tracked?

I was skeptical about Amazon until I used their MP3 downloader. It's fantastic and loads straight into iTunes. It's all I use now, and any other music stores hoping to compete need to follow their example.

Same, why would anyone even bother with iTunes when Amazon will sell you a higher bitrate MP3 that will work on any Mac or PC or iPod or whatever. All of my digital media purchases are now made at Amazon. And as mentioned, their downloads and loader are fast and seamless.

"what’s interesting is who’s in fourth place: Amazon. "

Arik,
Who was in fourth place in:
2007?
2005?
2004?

Amazon. (Fifth place in 2006-switched places with Target).

AAC sounds better than MP3. That's why I still use the iTunes Store

"I made the switch to iTunes a few months back because of the DRM restrictions that still exist on so much iTunes music. The DRM may have fallen by the wayside in the case of some label, http://www.divx-converter.net but I have to say I got hooked on the Amazon.com experience."