I haven’t been this con­fused over a cool Inter­net ser­vice… prob­a­bly ever. AmazonMP3 is simul­ta­ne­ously one of the most excit­ing things to hap­pen in online music ever, and a source of great per­sonal confusion.

I want to use it (and will) because it’s freak­ing awesome. The bitrate thing doesn’t mas­sively con­cern me… gen­er­ally speak­ing, I can’t tell the dif­fer­ence (though I will con­tinue to rip my CDs as loss­less, mostly in case I lose them). What con­cerns me is the poten­tial under­min­ing of my CD-store perus­ing ways as a result! I haven’t had to con­sider this until now because main­stream music sim­ply hasn’t been avail­able in a rel­a­tively open (don’t give me crap about MP3 patents, any­one can read them), DRM-free format.

It ships with art­work but that so doesn’t count.

Oh, so appar­ently this post was a waste of time. Of course, it’s only licensed for US sales. I don’t know why that didn’t occur to me, but it didn’t. Now I’m grumpy. And irra­tionally crav­ing popcorn.

Well, if you’re in the US and using iTunes… stop. This is pretty cool for you guys, mean­while I’ll keep buy­ing my grey-market imported CDs (which is com­pletely legal in Aus­tralia and morally fine). All that’s stand­ing between me and Amazon’s MP3 music is a US ship­ping address for invoices, pre­sum­ably, so I totally could just make one up. Not break­ing any law that I’m under there. But what­ever, it’s all too messy.

Yeah, that’s right, record com­pa­nies screwed it up again.

We’ll get there, one day…