Amazon – Just sell me the music

Another “DRM-free” music seller arrives, and another disappointment – this time around it’s Amazon, who today launched the beta of their Amazon MP3 music store.

At this stage it’s USA only, but on the plus side the pricing looks reasonable and Amazon have always impressed me with their service, and also their ability to build a web site that gets straight to the point and doesn’t try and mess you about with flashing thingumajigs.

What could go wrong? Apparently nothing, if you want to buy a single track. Try to buy an album though, you MUST install their “download software”. That instantly rules it out if you’re not using Windows/Mac, but regardless of that I don’t like it. No doubt it’s all very innocent, but on reading the terms I would have to agree to, they’re going to great lengths to make sure I’m not allowed to find out what the software does if I allow it onto my machine (section 3.3) and they seem to be saying that they can remotely modify they software to disable it if they like (section 3.2).

I’m sure this will be no barrier to those who happily install “1000 smiley faces for your emailz” and “super hot toolbar 2.0″ without a care in the world, but personally I don’t need some top-secret proprietary software to download a simple file, no attempt has been made to explain why I would, and even if there was an explanation I’m still not agreeing to those terms. Next please.