Amazon To Launch DRM-Free Music Store?

[PouncePony]

webpronews link

 

[nfusion770]

Competition is nice and all, but until someone offers lossless downloads, I am not interested. Besides, its going to be pretty tough to beat the used CD prices that Amazon already offers.

 

[Digitalbath3737]

I need lossless. Not because I actually use it on my DAP... but because I don't trust anything encoded by anyone else. Plus one day i may want to switch to a different format. I'd hate to transcode.

So until drm free lossless DL are available, I'll stick to cds

 

[Chef Medeski]

Quote:

Originally Posted by nfusion770 /img/forum/go_quote.gif Competition is nice and all, but until someone offers lossless downloads, I am not interested. Besides, its going to be pretty tough to beat the used CD prices that Amazon already offers.

If its available in 320 MP3 and its close to the same price as iTunes I might actually download my first legal song. DRM is stupid. So its good to get rid of that, if they bump the quality they will have the perfect store unless there is little music and expensive prices.

 

[4metta]

Quote:

Originally Posted by nfusion770 /img/forum/go_quote.gif Competition is nice and all, but until someone offers lossless downloads, I am not interested. Besides, its going to be pretty tough to beat the used CD prices that Amazon already offers.

+1. Sound quality is important. I wouldn't mind buying Lossless tunes cause it would be a greener alternative than all that packaging that come with cds (plus I would save a lot of space not having to store all those cases!) but I want a high quality sound.

 

[krmathis]

Quote:

Originally Posted by nfusion770 /img/forum/go_quote.gif Competition is nice and all, but until someone offers lossless downloads, I am not interested.

Ditto! Until I can legally download DRM-free lossless encoded music I will stay with the good old CD.
Sound quality is very important, and 128/192Kbps encoded MP3 or AAC is not always transparent to my ears. So I take no risk!

 

[ILikeMusic]

Hopefully they will have a higher-than-128kb option, but another frustrating characteristic of music download services are the annoying holes in the catalog as decreed by the marketing department and I would suspect any (legal) download service would be subject to that nonsense.

I would purchase from a DRM-free service if it offered a complete catalog of 192kb or above tracks, but it looks like a premium will be charged due to no DRM restrictions and if download costs end up being even higher than the current standard then I agree that it makes more sense all the way around to just get the CD and be done with it (you would probably save money in the end, plus get better quality), unless one is just lookung for a single track or something.

A perfect answer would be a legal 'allofmp3'-type service where you can choose your own format, but of course that makes too much sense to ever be implemented.

 

[Emon]

I only want lossless downloads because it seems silly to me to download music at the same price, per song, as buying the CD, but compressed. Sometimes buying the CD is cheaper. So unless the music downloads are really cheap...