Amazon vs. iTunes Music Purchases

I wanted to get some more Christmas music this year, and after much debating and reading of reviews on Amazon, I decided on the following albums:

• Celtic Woman - A Christmas Celebration
• Vince Guaraldi Trio - A Charlie Brown Christmas
• Andy Williams - Personal Christmas Collection (What? We used to hear a lot of his Christmas music when I was growing up, so it brings nostalgia and comfort. Shut up.)

We usually buy our music on iTunes, but Amazon had just given away a $3.00 credit towards purchase of mp3s, and I'd bought some new songs using their Amazon Downloader. The program adds your purchases directly to iTunes or another program/folder of your choice. It was a mostly simple process, although it didn't add one of the four songs properly and I had to go to iTunes and add it to the library manually. And for some reason, when I close it and then buy more music, I have to re-download their Downloader and run it again. That may just be a PEBKAC error, though. I'm not sure.

At any rate, knowing that it was a fairly simple process, I figured I'd do a price comparison between Amazon and iTunes and go with whichever one was cheaper. The Celtic Woman album was $6.99 on Amazon, $7.99 on iTunes. Point for Amazon. Andy Williams Personal Christmas Collection was $8.99 on Amazon, $9.99 on iTunes. And the Charlie Brown Christmas album was $5.00 (!) on Amazon and $7.99 on iTunes. Amazon won on all three purchases, and so did I, since I saved $4.99 on the 3 albums.

Out of the three albums, Celtic Woman downloaded to iTunes with no problem; Charlie Brown downloaded tracks 3 through 16 (1 and 2 were in the library but not added to iTunes automatically for some odd reason); and the Andy Williams album at first didn't show up in the downloader. I clicked "Download again" on the Amazon screen, and it went just fine and loaded in iTunes, too. So if you're using the automatic downloader, be sure to keep your purchase screens open until the albums show as downloaded there; then they should be on your computer and you can add them from their folder if they don't happen to go straight to iTunes.

I haven't checked other albums out to see if the trend continues with Amazon as the less expensive option, but I will certainly be doing that in the future when I buy more music. It was mostly painless and worth a few minutes of manual work to save that much money.