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The Prices: Amazonmp3 vs Google Music?

J

Jeff123

Newbie
Should I use Amazonmp3 to buy my music or should I wait a few more months for Google Music?

I don't care about having cloud-based music service, and I would probably never use that feature.

Instead, I want to be able to buy my music for a cheap price. When Google does release Google Music, do you think it will be cheaper than Amazon's prices, or should I just go ahead and start buying my music from Amazonmp3?
 
There haven't been any rumors about pricing yet, but considering that Amazon is already generally cheaper than the other giant of the industry (iTunes), it's hard to imagine Google wrenching a much better deal from the labels. The real advantage of the rumored Google store would be the ability to stream rather than downloading, but that's only a huge advantage if you're not worried about bitrate/quality.

In short, if you're dying to have a certain album right now, it's doubtful that it would be worth waiting, but there's no reason to splurge at Amazon right now if you can afford to hold off.
 
A.Nonymous said:
To me the Cloud drive and Cloud player thing that Amazon is rolling out is a killer, killer combo.
Click to expand...
I'm trying it right now. I uploaded about 5 albums which I encoded myself from EAC CD Rips (in lossless FLAC). For the Amazon Cloud thing I decided to go with 320 CBR AAC-LC and I uploaded the albums.

The phone interface seems kewl but I'm on cricKet and being the end of the month ... well ... I've gone over my data limit which means I don't pay more (thankfully) but my speed has been throttled. So I can't get it to stream "live" because my 3G is just too damn slow now.

However it has the option to download from the Cloud so it's on your Android and I'm doing that now.

The thing I find interesting is that there was a disclaimer when I first tried to do the streaming that the music is at the same bitrate as what you uploaded and therefore to be careful about your data plan etc.

To me this is good news. It tells me that Amazon isn't re-encoding my music.

The few other Cloud like music services I have looked at all want to re-encode your music to low (nasty ... bad bad bad) bitrates.

If it is true and Amazon is doing no re-encoding then THEY GOT ME as a customer.

Funny thing is I never buy digital music. I only buy CD's and rip 'em LOL but 5GB while generous is still not much so if I like it enough over time (still too early to tell but so far I'm loving it) then I'll probably go for a paid plan that offers more space.
 
I don't get the problem here. If you buy music with Amazon you can chose to download a copy from your Cloud for personal use. Then if you later decide to upload to Google's Cloud you have the files.

I never ever let myself be tied to some 3rd party's ownership of the music. Even when it was sold DRM. I'd burn the songs to a CDRW and re-rip them to remove the DRM. I buy a song from whoever has the best deal and add it to my personal library. The cloud is just a convenient backup that allows me the ability to stream while I'm away from home.

If Google's music cloud doesn't allow you to upload your own files then it's DOA, IMHO. That's what is killing the other current streaming sites.
 
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