

  Five billion iTunes songs sold. One looming problem: AmazonMP3 is better - prakash
http://venturebeat.com/2008/06/19/five-billion-itunes-songs-sold-one-looming-problem-amazonmp3-is-better/

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boucher
Amazon MP3 is worse than the iTunes store in every way except price. Amazon is
competing almost solely on price, and they're losing.

I think one of the reasons is that when something is that cheap already (99
cents), saving 10 or 20 cents doesn't look so attractive (even though,
percentage wise, its actually pretty significant).

But it should be really clear to anyone who pays attention to iTunes that
Apple is selling _way_ more tracks than albums, so the fact that Amazon has
cheap album deals means even less to most people.

The thing is, Amazon certainly had the capabilities to build a better (or
nearly better, since they'll never be able to integrate as well on a website)
store, but they didn't. AmazonMP3's search feature, for example, works _much
worse_ than Amazon.com's. They could have also done really great integration
with Amazon.com, but instead they do next to nothing.

Apple definitely can't rest on its laurels (nobody can), but the fact remains
that nobody has come close to building a better music store.

