We're winners in this contest

Just before Apple starts its new music foray with a Seattle coffee giant, the city's e-commerce behemoth brings its digital audio plans into focus. The battle of Puget Sound giants could transform where we buy music — both where on the virtual Net and where in the physical world.

Amazon.com launched an early version of its downloadable music store this week with 2.3 million songs from two major labels — EMI and Universal — and thousands of smaller firms and independent publishers.

All songs are free of digital-rights management (DRM) encryption, and can be played on any device or in any program that handles MP3 music files. (Amazon calls it a beta-test version, but it's fully available to anyone.)

Apple may have been the first to push the envelope on DRM-free purchases by offering its iTunes Plus songs in June, but Amazon seems to have filled out its potential a little faster. While Amazon offers just over a third of the total number of songs sold by the iTunes Store, it seems that Apple's raw number of DRM-free songs is fewer than Amazon's.

And Amazon is charging 89 to 99 cents per song for most tracks and $4.99 to $9.99 for most albums. Apple's DRM-free tracks cost an extra 30 cents and DRM-free albums an extra 30 percent of their initial price.

Amazon uses 256 Kbps MP3 encoding, while Apple has chosen the 256 Kbps AAC format. AAC is arguably better, but at that level of audio sampling, it will be the rare listener who can discern any difference.

Unlike many Web, software, and hardware launches, Amazon is just as welcoming to Mac OS X users as those who run Windows.

That happy-to-see-you attitude will provide Apple with the biggest run for its money yet. Most music consumers already have iTunes accounts, and most participants in e-commerce have an Amazon.com account, so there's no bar to finding an audience for the service or the audience making purchases.

Amazon's also fortunate in that it doesn't have to distribute music-library software and music-player-management programs; Amazon's service works with the two ubiquitous choices: Windows users already have Windows Media Player, and both Mac and Windows users with iPods have iTunes already installed. The Windows software is bundled; iTunes is a free download.

Amazon suggests you download a tiny helper program, the Amazon MP3 Downloader. After installing the software, you can set any browser to open a special download file in Amazon's program, which then handles retrieving the files you've purchased, whether albums or individual songs.

The Amazon MP3 Downloader also neatly copies the music into iTunes without any additional steps. The music is downloaded by default to a folder in your home directory's Music folder.

If you have iTunes set to copy imported music — the choice made if you haven't changed it — downloaded files will be stored in the Amazon folder and within the iTunes library.

In a few test purchases, I found the process just as simple as buying music from the iTunes Store, without the limitations imposed by Apple's format.

It was much easier to jump around to find related music and additional information, and to navigate back and forth. Amazon is a Web retailer, after all, and the iTunes Store within the iTunes program has just a subset of Web features. Because it's the Web, there's no learning curve.

Apple may have known Amazon's threat to its digital-download hegemony was on the way. Earlier this month, Apple announced a unique partnership with Starbucks, aimed at selling more music when people are out and about.

Starting Tuesday, when you walk into a specially equipped Starbucks in Seattle or New York with an iPhone, iPod touch or laptop with iTunes installed, you'll be able to purchase the currently playing song with a single click, and browse recently played songs. Starbucks in more cities will follow.

Apple's also devised what they're calling the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store, a subset of its regular store, that's available only on Wi-Fi networks, including the hot-spot network used by Starbucks.

The coffee retailer won't charge anything for using this store on its network, but you'll have to pay its provider, T-Mobile HotSpot (a Seattle-based division of the firm), for access to the greater Internet. Is that irony lost on Apple's iPhone partner AT&T, a T-Mobile rival?

With an iPhone, you may have access for Web browsing and e-mail over AT&T's slow EDGE cellular data network, but the phone giant isn't planning to allow that network to clog up with music downloads.

Similarly, Starbucks isn't allowing gigabyte video downloads over their Wi-Fi network.

Apple and Starbucks are also dying to get you in the door, with Starbucks giving away 50 million cards good for specific song downloads on iTunes starting on Tuesday.

I'm enjoying this battle of giants, headquartered in our rainy town, as the outcome can be nothing but good for those of us interested in expanding our music libraries without being treated like a potential thief or being constrained to a particular device or protection system.

Glenn Fleishman writes the Practical Mac column for Personal Technology and about technology in general for The Seattle Times and other publications. Send questions to gfleishman@seattletimes.com. More columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists