Geekularity

There may be a day in the not-too-distant future where a you need only hum a few bars before your bio-media-comm implant automatically checks all the online music stores, buys, downloads, and plays the song directly into your cerebral-cortextual-whoozawhatzit. Until then, there will be at least a few moving parts between you and your music enjoyment. Apple has made tremendous strides to reduce the number of moving parts by creating the closed system of iTunes and iPod. Outside of that system however, the amount of work required to get music into your ears increases exponentially.

Efforts to integrate other music services into the iPod music experience have come and gone, all with mediocre success. The process of transferring music from the outside into iTunes has either been too difficult to attract users or has been blocked, either legally or technologically, by Apple.

Amazon introduced their MP3 music download service this week, and so far it appears to have legs! The downloader used by this service is available on PC and Mac platforms, it integrates with iTunes and Windows Media Player, and best of all, the music is high fidelity and DRM free! The installation was a snap, and the music sounds great! Coupled with Amazon’s One-Click shopping experience, this service is poised to take a bite out of Apple’s music sales!

The Amazon MP3 service is still in beta, so there may be some additional features and UI enhancements in the coming months, but as of right now, it looks pretty good. Apple has a challenge that it will need to answer to. Possible responses from Apple may include:

• Ramping up their DRM-free music offerings assuming they can make nice with enough music labels. Perhaps they’ll even drop some prices on songs. Yay!! Competition breeds choice.
• Some technology kung fu or legal action which limits Amazon’s ability to load the songs directly into iTunes. Boo!! Apple talks the talk when it comes to openess, but can’t walk the walk as their feet are in cement shoes being poured by the ??? (RIAA?).

Fortunately, Amazon can play in the tall grass with the other big dogs, so I think we finally have another formidable player in the online music market! Game On!