I was wandering around the Internets as I often do, and I was reading one of my personal favorite bloggers, Machinist, who mentioned that he loved Amazon's new beta music download store and thought it was much better than iTunes. He pointed out the tracks are recorded at 256 kpbs rather than 128 kpbs (which means much better sound quality), they are free of the restrictive Digital Rights Management software that means you can't play them on anything but an iPod or your computer, and that Amazon had a lot of music iTunes didn't -- although the reverse, he said, is also true, given that iTunes has 6 million sings and Amazon, so far, only 2 million.

So I went to Amazon and checked it out. And I found that:

With the installation of a tiny little helper program, the download is incredibly easy and pops the songs right into iTunes for you.

The sound quality is much, much better.

The files play on anything, my iPod, my computer, can be burned onto a CD, and can be played on any other kind of MP3 player, made by Apple or not.

The songs cost either less, or the same, as iTunes -- and you don't pay extra for unrestricted tracks, likeyou do on iTunes; that's all Amazon sells.

And it was all done with one click, using my pre-existing Amazon account.

So I sat around and looked at the pretty shiny iTunes store where I've spent so many happy hours, downloading songs and TV shows and feeling a little thrill every time I pressed the button to buy something. I petted my iPod, which I love more than I've loved any other inanimate object except perhaps the black leather, high-heeled lace-up boots with red, turned down perforated leather cuffs that Prince would have killed for in the 80s, and I thought: Machinist is right.

Amazon's gonna kill iTunes. Check it out here.