Archive for October, 2007

Oct 18

Amazon MP3 offers Earth’s biggest selection of a la carte, DRM-free MP3 music downloads. With over 2 million songs from more than 180,000 artists represented by over 20,000 major and independent labels, Amazon MP3 complements Amazon.com’s existing selection of over 1 million CDs to offer customers more selection of physical and digital music than any other retailer.

Every song and album on Amazon MP3 is available exclusively in the MP3 format without digital rights management (DRM) software. This means that Amazon MP3 customers are free to enjoy their music downloads using any hardware device, organize their music using any music management application, and burn songs to CDs. By comparison, Apple iTunes charges 30 cents extra per song for DRM-free downloads. Also Apple’s native download format is AAC(MP4), which is not compatible with many music players.

Most songs are priced from 89 cents to 99 cents, with more than 1 million of the 2 million songs priced at 89 cents. The top 100 best-selling songs are 89 cents, unless marked otherwise. Most albums are priced from $5.99 to $9.99. The top 100 best-selling albums are $8.99 or less, unless marked otherwise.

Every song on Amazon MP3 is encoded at 256 kilobits per second, which gives customers high audio quality at a manageable file size.

With most songs and albums priced lower than Apple, and no restrictions, I’m all over this thing. Go check out Amazon MP3.

Oct 10

PostSecret

Frank Warren has just released his fourth PostSecret book, A Lifetime of Secrets. Until today, I didn’t know this book or his previous three even existed. I was looking at the blogger entry page and his blog was featured as a staff favorite. What an amazing project. People send him anonymous postcards with personal stories and, well, secrets on them and he publishes them in these books. This has been going on for about three years. Here are a couple videos that can give you an idea of what it’s all about:

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This next one is more about the current book.

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Go check out the PostSecret site.

There are interesting, funny, sad and some absolutely heartbreaking things there. Also, check out the book, A Lifetime of Secrets.