Alternatives to iTunes: how 5 rival music services match up

Posted by Ed Bott @ 4:00 am

How well do the current crop of online music services stack up against the iTunes Store?

When I did my inaugural round-up of iTunes alternative last year, I was looking for ways to avoid the high price of iTunes, and I succeeded. I found six rivals that offered significant savings—at least 10% and potentially much more. My criteria included services aimed at music lovers who want the option to buy music by the track or by the album. Several of the alternative services included interesting differentiating features, with the biggest being the all-you-can-listen-to subscription model.

So what’s new? When I took a closer look recently at five of those six services (including a fresh look at iTunes itself), I found that not much has changed from last year—except the owners. Last December, Apple acquired Lala, my favorite from last year. As I noted earlier this week, Lala’s innovation has ground to a halt. Apple is no doubt working feverishly on incorporating Lala’s cloud-friendly features into the next generation of the iTunes Store. But for now, you’d be hard-pressed to spot any changes in the iTunes music store.

I looked at three main factors: price, selection, and ease of use. To make price comparisons, I created a basket of 10 rock, folk, country, and classical albums, six recent releases and four back catalog choices from the previous century.

On price, iTunes was once again the most expensive, with the highest price for the collection. See the chart at right for details; the asterisk in the Cost column indicates that two of the five alternative services didn’t offer the entire selection of albums—Zune Marketplace was missing two and eMusic had only six of the ten albums on my list. To figure the total price tag for those two services. I calculated the cost of the missing albums using the prices from the iTunes store. Amazon MP3 and Lala offered significant savings over iTunes, with total savings of 11% and 20%, respectively. Rhapsody offered only trivial savings over Apple’s store, and the Zune prices were all over the map, with three albums costing more than their iTunes rivals.

There is no question that iTunes has the biggest selection of all the services. According to a January 2010 report from eMarketer, the iTunes Store has roughly 11 million tracks, followed by Amazon at 10 million and Lala at 8 million; Rhapsody, eMusic, and the Zune Marketplace have 6 million tracks to choose from—not the same ones. I was not at all surprised to find some recent releases missing at eMusic; I was surprised, however, that the new release from She & Him, “Volume Two,” was unavailable from Zune.

When it comes to ease of use, it’s logical to assume that the dedicated iTunes and Zune apps, which integrate an online store with playback, library management, and sync functions, are the best choice. If you own either of those devices and don’t buy much music in a typical year, that’s probably a reasonable decision. But Amazon, Lala, and eMusic all include lightweight downloader apps that are specifically designed to manage music properly and even add it automatically to the iTunes or Windows libraries. I found on both Windows PCs and Macs that I didn’t have to jump through any hoops to get downloaded music into either location. It just worked.

I left a few services out of this round-up. Amie Street was on last year’s list, but its selection is too limited (a sort of eMusic Lite) for me to include it this year. Likewise, after testing Napster (which was purchased by Best Buy last year) I chose not to include it; I found its latest incarnation as frustrating as ever to use. I also left out Walmart MP3, which has low prices but a very weak selection. 7Digital, which is based in the UK and only recently launched in the United States, is on my list for the next update in this series.