With little or no fanfare, Amazon’s MP3 store has arrived in the UK. And in keeping with the credit crunch spirit of late, there are some real bargains on offer. Albums currently start at £3 (approx. $4.5) and some individual tracks are being offered for as little as 59 pence (87 cents). If you’re old school like me, for example, the first few Led Zeppelin albums fall in the £3 bargain bucket selection. Nice.
See also: Review: Amazon MP3 offers compelling, promising alternative to iTunes
As is standard with any digital music store-related announcement these days, we received a press release from competitor 7Digital offering up the “strong” views of CEO Ben Drury.
“We’d like to congratulate Amazon UK for finally entering the MP3 market albeit a little late. We announced on September 16th that we were the first in Europe to achieve this. It’s great that general retailers like Amazon clearly recognise the importance of digital music for consumers and the MP3 universal music format which works on all devices.”
Drury then goes onto bemoan Amazon’s lower bit-rate: “their MP3 downloads are only 256kps quality so they are not delivering the high quality 320kps MP3’s unlike 7digital”.
Doesn’t sound all that congratulatory after all.
7digital’s prices look like they are 40-odd% higher. I can’t wait for them to go out a business :p I’m very pleased with the arrival of the amazon mp3 store!
I live in ‘mainland Europe’ a small island off the English coast. Does any one know when Amazon is going to start selling mp3’s there or is the market just too small?
@ DC Crowley
‘Mainland Europe’? Never heard of it 😉
Seriously, this is the problem with so many Internet-based content sites, the inability to set up shop world-wide due to pre-Internet licensing agreements.