“I must have been asleep for days…” because out of nowhere the Banshee music player allows you to shop and purchase music downloads from the Amazon MP3 store. You might be thinking, “Ah, big deal”, but you might want to rethink that. Let’s look at it this way:
What other music player allows you to purchase music from two major distribution sites as well as connect to Last.fm, Internet archives, and miro? None that I know of. This makes the recent migration from Rhythmbox to Banshee (for the Ubuntu distribution) an understandable choice.
Since the Ubuntu One Music Store was integrated into Rhythmbox, I have been using that tool for all of my music purchases. It’s been seamless, but not perfect. For example: There are times when music synchronization was quite slow. There was one occasion where not all of the tracks from an album downloaded. Those problems have all been resolved as of today. The file syncing is much faster and my missing tracks magically appeared one day. But there is one thing that Ubuntu One does not have that Amazon does - the massive amounts of recordings. Yes Ubuntu One does have a wide variety of selections to choose from. The average user would be happy with what they have to offer. But for people with more eclectic (or wide-ranging tastes), very few can beat the selection offered by Amazon. And of course Amazon does do a better job with their categories (Ubuntu One is missing the Soundtrack category - how did that get by the designers at 7Digital?).
Amazon also has a few other tricks up its sleeve that Ubuntu One does not:
- Free music giveaways.
- Aggressive pricing.
- Major marketing.
- The Amazon brand.
This is all great news. But all is not perfectly rosy. Yes, Banshee has become the default music player in Ubuntu (which will be seen in release 11.04). But Canonical looks to be making a grab for the cash with this venture. From all Amazon sales, Canonical stated they wanted 75% of all revenue generated by the built-in connection to the Amazon MP3 store. This revenue was already being donated (from Banshee) to the GNOME Foundation. Although it’s not a ton of money (just over $3,000 dollars was raised as of February 2011), from the perspective of the open source community, it’s the principle that really matters.
Ubuntu seems to be making this cash grab out of fear that Amazon integration will cut into the Ubuntu One revenue - and with good reason. People are familiar with Amazon. Not so much Ubuntu One. If average users are given the choice between an integration with Amazon or Ubuntu One - they are going to choose Amazon. Not so average users will either go with what’s cheapest, available, or lead with their conscience. As for myself…I will most likely start with Ubuntu One and, if I “still haven’t found what I’m looking for” I’ll move over to Amazon (who will most likely have what I want).