The Battle of the MP3 Stores

Anybody who’s spent time online looking for music knows that there’s a whole range of digital retailers beyond iTunes and Amazon. Some are very cheap, some are very expensive; some are expansive, some are niche-y; some look like they’re incredibly illegal.

But which of them is best? The answer’s bound to vary from person to person, but thanks to the handy-dandy MP3 Store Guide, you get a lot of data that will help you figure that answer out for yourself.

The MP3 Store Guide has information about everything from catalog size (from iTunes’s industry-leading 11 million to TenTracks‘s eensy weensy 250 songs) to song bitrate (from DJ-friendly 320kbps to DJ-set-spoiling 128kbps) to price range (from Lala‘s unbeatable $0.89 to Magnatune‘s confounding $18), plus helpful links where you can submit information about any stores the guide might have omitted.

About the only thing wrong with the Guide is its lack of information about what kind of music each store sells. For example, examining the raw data presented for Bleep, Warp Records’s official online store – $1.35 per song, a relatively modest catalog of 1 million songs – there seems like very little incentive to use it. But the fact that Bleep is run by Warp, and that it carries an exceptionally wide range of electronic dance music that’s difficult to find in other places (plus the fact that it’s significantly cheaper than its primary competitor, Beatport), is nowhere to be found on the guide.

Still, its incompleteness almost invites further exploration, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Tagged as: digital music, mp3s, site review