With a higher price than regular albums, no lossless audio and virtually no device support, iTunes LP seems like a hard sell. Turns out, it might be lame for musicians too—at least, the ones without platinum records.

I spoke with Brian McKinney, who runs Chocolate Lab Records, a smallish label out of Chicago. As someone who actually makes records, he saw potential in iTunes LP, and after seeing how incredibly simple the actual LP files are, started looking into making some himself. It didn't go so well:

I contacted the digital distribution manager at my label's distributor. He had a conference call with their iTunes rep at IODA and asked how we go about putting an LP together. He was told that LPs aren't being offered to indies and that there are only about 12 LPs being offered right now. They also said that iTunes charges a $10,000 production fee for them as well. So that pretty much edges out the indie market completely.

Deflecting criticism that it's just another way to squeeze a few extra dollars out of customers, Apple pitches iTunes LP as a way to bring back "the visual experience of the record album" (Which they helped kill in the first place. Penance, or something!)

But if they're charging ridiculous, prohibitive fees and only letting a few major labels take advantage of this—you know, the ones that iTunes needs to keep happy to be a viable music store, not the ones that might actually make something artistically interesting with LP—that romantic cry for the return of the album (it's more like the return of the Digipak, anyway) sounds a cynical and disingenuous. More to the point, it'll forever doom LP to gimmickry, because, well, the Dave Matthews Band can only carry you so far. —Thanks, Brian!

It's impossible not to love the concept of doubleTwist, the all-devices-welcome quasi-iTunes music manager, but up to this point the software has been pretty barebones. Now, things are gettin' ser-i-ous: doubleTwist has a built-in music store, courtesy of Amazon.

To put this into context, doubleTwist debuted not just as an alternative music manager for people with or without Apple players, but as a giant, coded jab at iTunes, Apple, and the way they do business. After launch, DVD Jon, who created doubleTwist, spent a few months waging a small-scale PR war, hanging Apple-baiting banners in San Francisco and parodying their famous "1984" ad. With Amazon MP3 store integration, that ad's promise—to "bring you choice"—has come true, and it's worth a thousand PR stunts

As has been the case with every other aspect of doubleTwist, the music storefront looks like a simpler version of the one in iTunes. Navigation and searching are about as simple as they could be, as are downloads, which only take a few clicks. The whole experience will be familiar to anyone weened on Apple's bloated beast, apart from a few things: Amazon's album prices are often lower than iTunes', and of course, you can immediately sync any music you download—there's only music, by the way—to practically any device you own, be it a Pre, a BlackBerry, a Sandisk, an iPod, or whatever.

The first version is Mac-only and tied to Amazon's US store, but Windows (and international) versions are on their way. [doubleTwist via Techcrunch]