As per a slashdot article today[1], it has been noticed that iTunes still sells music with DRM.  This is likely due to pressure from record labels being the greatest impacting factor on their business; if it became threatening to Apple to continue this practice, they would begin applying the pressure to the record labels to save their profitability.

Political factors aside, the UI on the iTunes store is extremely intuitive; as is the UI for Jamendo and Magnatune through Rhythmbox.  Jamendo and Magnatune do not sell mainstream music, however.  Rhythmbox therefor would, from a politically neutral perspective, supply a strongly useful additional feature by supporting a music store such as iTunes or Amazon.

Amazon has the political advantage of being DRM-free.  Both iTunes and Amazon ship non-free formats-- AAC for iTunes and MP3 for Amazon.  From a technical perspective, Amazon's MP3 files supply both higher-quality 256k bitrates and greater portability, due to wider support and complete lack of DRM; therefor a plug-in to buy music from Amazon would supply more technically useful functionality than one for iTunes.

Purchases from Amazon can be made as a single-song purchase[2], a full-album purchase[3], a physical CD purchase in several forms[4][5], or even LP vinyl purchase[6].  During any purchase where individual songs are available, as well as many where only physical CD or LP albums are shipped, Amazon allows a short clip preview.

A Rhythmbox plug-in for the Amazon store should initially locate only albums shipped and sold from Amazon, and only by searching rather than full listing.  It should show cover art; offer preview when available; allow individual song or full album download; and be capable of opening the relevant product page in a Web browser.  Future versions should allow allow any available purchase option including full album MP3 download and physical media, as well as purchase options from third-party sellers.

If possible, work should be done with Amazon to create a product search API that allows a basic HTTP query to retrieve an XML document describing the results and purchase options.  This will allow for better results and reduced load on Amazon's servers.  One possibility would include search results or a full-listing file to include links to XML documents completely describing each product, which could be brought down individually in an HTTP pipeline request; as with any normal HTTP access, the server can respond to HTTP HEAD requests with a Last-Modified field that says when these documents were last updated, thus allowing caching of third-party seller options and song/album information by the client.

[1] http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/22/0150239
[2] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001ESY22Y/
[3] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001ESSK7C/
[4] http://www.amazon.com/Appeal-Reason-Rise-Against/dp/B001FYRNJQ/
[5] http://www.amazon.com/Appeal-Reason-Ecopack-Rise-Against/dp/B001FBSMMQ/
[6] http://www.amazon.com/Appeal-Reason-Vinyl-Bonus-MP3s/dp/B001FBSMVW/

Feel free to add the information to the duplicate bug, although you don't need to write about why we should add support for that store, but how (and with links to API, rather than conjecture).

Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but please feel free to report any further bugs you find.


*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 480633 ***