It took six minutes. First I had to install the Amazon MP3 Downloader, a simple three-click process that dragged on longer than it should have because the page loaded so slowly. Then came a free song to show me how easily it worked (”Energy,” by the Apples in Stereo, though I thought I was going to get to choose any song when I pushed the button). And then I bought the number-ten downloaded album on Amazon’s new MP3 service, Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. This was loaded directly onto my iTunes in high-quality MP3s, with no Digital Rights Management restrictions. Because its forty-four minutes are split across just five tracks, it cost me $4.45.

The same album costs $11.99 on iTunes, though how long before that price drops? Already iTunes has eliminated the premium fee for buying music without the DRM lock, an annoyance that has always kept me from downloading much music from the iTunes store. Amazon’s MP3 service, which launched soft in late September, is expected to provide the competition necessary for iTunes to introduce the variable pricing the labels are keen to see. They’d like you to pay more than 99 cents for new music you really want and less for catalog items you might pick up if they were cheap, the same way you do at the Virgin Megastore. Amazon already does it — browsing around, I bought albums for $7.99 and $8.99 and one track for 89 cents.

It’s hardly perfect. Something about the title track of Wish You Were Here reminded me of Van Morrison’s “Almost Independence Day,” and I tried an impulse purchase. But Amazon doesn’t have MP3s from Warners yet, so no go. Amazon remembered I’d scoped Bruce Springsteen CDs in a previous visit, but when I took the bait, I was directed right to the CDs — no Sony MP3s yet (like Warners, the label has refused to sell DRM-free music). The interface is clean and easy to use, but it’s as bare-bones as it’s always been. The iTunes store is about music, but also design, and the recommendations are more interesting and better-written. It’s the difference between shopping at Target and at Prada.

I download the majority of my MP3s from eMusic, the indie-label service that’s most like shopping in an old record store. (Full disclosure: I was a subscriber before writing a few reissue reviews for eMusic.) Early estimates have Amazon vaulting to the number-three digital retailer, behind iTunes and eMusic, and Amazon is not yet even touting the service on the home page. Clearly, it offers a lot of what music buyers want: convenience, low prices, MP3s they can do whatever they want with. But is it wrong to feel like there’s something antiseptic about getting your music this way, from a digital megastore that hawks cookware, bras, DVD players and shoes? And is it wrong to feel like if they’d had every album I was looking for, it wouldn’t have mattered?