Make (Your Own) Plastic CDs: Amazon's No 'Creep'*

Radiohead is a commonly mentioned influence on many of the musicians and bands I listen to, and I was particularly motivated to check out their studio recordings after hearing them play live at Bonnaroo the summer of 2006. But Yahoo’s Music Unlimited’s 2+ million track library doesn’t include their material, nor does iTunes, in both cases I suspect because of the band’s insistence on selling only complete albums online (a requirement which, actually, is just fine with me; I can count on one hand’s fingers the number of times I’ve only wanted to obtain a single track from a musical act). I haven’t mustered up the motivation to drop $12-15 per brand new CD, and I haven’t had much luck finding the band’s material in used CD stores (a reflection, I suspect, of Radiohead’s enduring popularity and high musical quality, since Britney Spears CDs seem to be comparatively abundant ).

Yesterday morning, I jumped on Amazon’s website to check out the just-unveiled MP3 Music Store, and I was pleasantly surprised to find all of Radiohead’s albums available for purchase and download there. Amazon’s library encompasses EMI (as an adjunct to the company’s earlier DRM-free announcement with Apple), Universal (who’s following EMI’s lead, albeit not on iTunes, and at least for the moment only as a limited-time experiment), and a number of smaller independent labels. How much do the albums cost? You’ll likely be pleasantly surprised, as I was, with the following table’s data (make sure you also check out the per-track prices, and compare them to iTunes’):

The first time you buy an album, Amazon prompts you to install a small download manager program, which worked fine for me with Firefox-on-Windows XP and more generally is reportedly compatible with Windows XP, Windows Vista and Mac OS 10.4. It’s necessary only for purchasing entire albums, not individual tracks. Downloads were extremely fast, albeit somewhat erratic; below is a Task Manager screenshot taken at just past 7AM PST yesterday, which reports a ~25 Mbps peak downstream speed:

Note that the downloading took place over my SureWest 50 Mbps symmetrical fiber connection, and that my laptop was 802.11g-tethered to my router via an access point intermediary (i.e. the downloads might have been even faster over CAT5e).

Amazon’s FAQ says that when possible, the content is VBR (variable bitrate)-encoded at a 256 kbps average bitrate, but that some material is 256 Kbps CBR (constant bitrate)-encoded. A quick mathematical calculation of file size divided by playback time on several random tracks supports Amazon’s bitrate claim, although strangely enough when I analyze the files’ properties in Windows Explorer, the reported bitrate is 320 Kbps (perhaps this is the VBR peak?).

The tracks are likely watermarked to track their spread via piracy, although Universal is reportedly not doing this on a customer-by-customer unique-watermark basis. The probability of watermarking gave me brief pause, given my past ‘golden ears’ experiences with it, but frankly since I don’t have access to un-watermarked equivalents for A-B comparison purposes, I figured I’d be perfectly content with the material…and I am. I’m off on a few-day trip now, but as soon as I get back I’ll burn the albums to CD for posterity.

*In case you didn’t catch my admittedly obscure allusion in the first part of the title