Lately there have been so many crappy ideas for online media distribution. This morning I was surprised and delighted to find that Amazon, with their new MP3 Downloads store, is the first big player in this field that seems to "get it."

John Gruber provides lots of interesting details and observations. He sums up my reactions perfectly:

The new Amazon MP3 Store looks like no previous iTunes Store rival. The music is completely DRM-free, encoded at a very respectable 256 kbps, includes a ton of songs from major record labels, and offers terrific software support for Mac OS X.

[…]

There’s very high “it just works” factor here. Music is easy to find, easy to buy, and easy to download once you have the Amazon MP3 Downloader installed.

The one significant thing I can think of that Amazon lacks, aside from the smoother and nicer-looking navigation in iTunes, is previews. I find the 30-second previews on the iTunes Store very useful for discovering new stuff and for making purchasing decisions with almost no regrets.

I've often used Amazon to research products before buying them elsewhere. Now I'll be using iTunes to research music before buying it at Amazon.

Update: I stand corrected (and embarrassed). Gruber pointed out that the Amazon Store does have previews. Not that it's an excuse for over-hasty blog posting, but I have FlashBlock turned on and didn't notice the preview controls.

I see you can choose to preview all the songs currently displayed, one after the other, like a kind of sampler album. I'm pretty sure you can only preview one song at a time in iTunes, but I won't be surprised if I'm wrong about that too.

I just did an Amazon MP3 search on "candy" and I'm now playing previews of all the songs that got returned. It's a game I sometimes play in iTunes too, except with Amazon I can just click once and go back to whatever else I was doing, while the random snippets play in the background.