I have had an iPod for almost two years now and I have a love / hate relationship with Apple and iTunes. I think the iPod is a great gadget and not having owned any other players, I can't say anything about how it stacks up to the Zune or Creative Labs offerings, etc.
However, I think iTunes as software sucks. It doesn't follow the normal paradigms of Windows programs and perhaps because Apple does things how they think they should be done, whether you like it or not! Well I've grown very accustomed to using clipboards and cut-and-paste and drag-and-drop and iTunes does little of this. Anyway, that isn't the point of this post.
I have real problems with anything that over complicates life for the honest fellow. The iTunes store allows you to purchase songs at 99 cents each, but they are only playable it seems through Apples iTunes or the iPod. I recently had to upgrade a hard drive and discovered there is no easy and quick to migrate. You have to deauthorize iTunes and then backup your software and then move it somehow, but iTunes would not let me move it to a portable hard drive. I could back up to a CD/DVD, but I really was just trying to upgrade a machine and I spent more time on the silly iPod stuff than on any other part of the upgrade. Now that is a penalty for me, an honest user. I have not even purchased that much from iTunes for this very reason. I had a hard disk crash last summer and I lost one of my five iTunes installs. I do have a drive image of that drive before the crash so I could actually find another drive, put the image back on to the drive, install it on my computer, deauthorize it, then remove it, etc. But that's too much work to assuage Apple's licensing.
Enter Amazon
Amazon now has an 89 cent music store! I downloaded two songs today, played them on my computer through Windows Media Player and I have not even put them on the iPod yet. I haven't even launched iTunes today. Maybe tomorrow will be the day to add them to the iPod. These are simple MP3s and I can back them up easily on an external drive, or on a CD or a DVD, or even move them to offline storage. It's just like having a CD. I really don't have to waste another minute on jumping through hoops.
Maybe Apple had some real tough hurdles with the music industry and their license model was a first generation one. But no more of that for me since Amazon has launched. I can even get a 30 second preview of the song, which is important for me because sometimes I hear something and I hunt for it later and then take a chance that what I'm buying is what I heard. Sometimes I'm right but not always.
Check it out. Amazon MP3 downloads