Everyone and their mom is coming out with an online music store. I have no problem with that, except none of them are doing *anything* original. I can go on about that for hours.

So here's one that actually is kinda cool. Audio Lunchbox is an online music store for Indie music. Cool things about this store:

* Good selection. Lots of stuff i've heard of, lots of stuff i haven't
* No DRM. I think the whole DRM thing is being blown out of proportion (I will *never* hit any of the restrictions the iTunes music store has), but no DRM is better than DRM
* 192kbits VBR. Assuming they are using a good quality encoder, this should be better than 128kbit AAC from Apple
* Preview track plays 30 seconds like iTunes. Preview album plays 30 seconds from each track on the album.
* Previewing music just opens a .m3u playlist in iTunes. That means it takes advantage of iTunes/Quicktime's zero buffering streaming. You click on the song and it plays immediately. It doesn't have to pre-buffer like Real and all the other shitty systems
* This company is in Manhattan Beach, basically near Torrance
* Artists get 65% of revenue!!!!!!

Anyways, I think Apple did a great job with the music store (they just hit 50 million songs!) but all the other services are just straight up copy cats. Steve Jobs had to work hard to get the record labels to agree to sell music online. All the other stores just signed the same contract. Good job.

But this store has done something more. No DRM with big artists like Offspring and Bad Religion. Take that, RIAA.