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It’s a Great Deal For a Month At Least

Amazon is offering a free trial of Amazon Prime, which lets you take advantage of FREE TWO DAY SHIPPING.  This is an awesome deal if you are planning on buying anything this month–especially something big and expensive.

After the free trial, it’s $79 a monthyear, which is still a good deal if you buy a lot of stuff even a few things a year from the big A.  If it’s not something you’d use enough to justify the cost, just make sure you opt out of the program at the end of the month and you are in good shape.  I usually get the Super Saver shipping, which means I have to wait a week to get my stuff…not this month!

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Yahoo! Music Store Closing

You know all those songs you “bought” through Yahoo!?  Turns out you were just renting.

After September 30, 2008, you will not be able to transfer songs to unauthorized computers or re-license these songs after changing operating systems. Please note that your purchased tracks will generally continue to play on your existing authorized computers unless there is a change to the computer’s operating system.

Oh wait, there’s a fix.  You can burn all of your songs to CDs and re-rip them DRM-free.  It doesn’t really matter to them that reason you bought an electronic copy was to avoid the CD…thanks for being such a great customer!

Backing up your music to an audio CD will allow you to copy the music back to your computer again if the license keys for your original music files cannot be retrieved.

I strongly recommend Amazon for buying music–totally DRM free.  You can copy and move it around as much as you want.  Once you pay for a file it is yours.

HT–ReadWriteWeb

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Pandora Online Radio–It Rocks

It’s free. No really, it’s completely free.

I’ve been using Pandora internet radio for a couple of weeks now. I hesitated to mention it here because I was afraid that by “free” they meant “free to register” or “free for a little while.” Nope–it’s seriously free. It’s good too, and has one of the coolest interfaces I’ve seen on the web.

Not only do they allow you to set up your own stations that you can listen to from anywhere, but by telling Pandora what you like and dislike it also finds new music for you that it thinks you’ll dig. So far it’s been dead on for me as far as suggestions, and I’ve found some cool new music.

Pandora allows you to purchase music straight through Amazon or iTunes. That’s where they make their money, which I guess is how they are able to offer the service for free.