When I switched over to the Soundtracks section at Amazon, I was amazed to find that the number one song in Soundtracks was “One Night in Bangkok,” a song that originally appeared in the 1980′s in the broadway musical Chess. And I can tell you why it’s number 1 right now.

Back in the 1980′s I was growing up in, well, several towns, but at the time One Night in Bangkok hit the Top 40, I was living in Raleigh, NC. I listened almost religiously to the local “Morning Zoo” show, which at the time was something of an innovation in morning radio. I even taped the morning show and for years maintained a collection of perhaps 25 cassettes of bits and songs from the “Zoo.”

One Night in Bangkok hit its zenith of popularity that year — I think it was 1985 or so. Aside from being played repeatedly on the radio, the local Zoo team took the song and rewrote the lyrics to make it Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill-specific, with references to local towns and culture. Back then the Research Triangle Park (RTP) was just starting to boom, pulling in a mass of educated workers from the north into this historically less-educated area. The influx of Yankees was bulking up the economy while transforming the culture. The Zoo players were part of that experience — they were marketing to the northerners who found themselves in the land of “Y’all.” Making fun of local southern culture was de rigeur, as has been the tradition of northerners for years.

Anyway… The rewritten Bangkok song was a hit and was played even more than the original from Chess. Until it burned out, of course. I consider the Bangkok song in either format to be a real cultural touchstone for me.

As I’ve collected music over the years, I’ve wanted to get a copy of the original One Night in Bangkok song. While in college, you could get the entire show — Chess — on CD, but it was extraordinarily expensive. It cost about double what any other two-disc set cost at that time. I wanted the song, but I wasn’t going to spend $40+ for just a single track.

Years passed and the Chess album price didn’t decline much, and for a while it was even out of print. The Bangkok song never made it into 1980′s compilations, I’m sure due to licensing and royalty issues. When iTunes came about, I looked for the song when I thought of it, never found it, and just gave up.

Us 1980′s nerds never forget, however. Turns out the song was released in CD compilation form back in 2000, but wasn’t put online until recently. With the opening of the Amazon MP3 store, the song was made available as a single track in 256Kb un-DRM’ed glory. It is chopped up a little from the original — there are some lines missing — but the bulk of it is there. iTunes has it now, too, but at 128Kb.

So… All that pent-up collectors’ demand has been released, and now a track from an obscure 1980′s broadway show is available to a listening public that came of age in the 1980′s and now has the requisite disposable income to buy up memories from the past.

The (moronic) music companies may yet wise up. They need to open their catalogs completely and offer everything up via easy-to-use and fairly-priced online mechanisms. Honest people will be honest — you have to give them a chance. It’s well worth $0.89 to me to buy a piece of my musical history. And apparently a lot of other folks agree.

By the way… it appears that tracks in the Amazon store are not all encoded the same way. The last songs I bought were encoded in Variable Bit Rate format. But the Bangkok track is straight up MP3 at 256Kb. So the catalog at Amazon is apparently not monolithic.

That’s definitely not what I want. If you tell me it’s 256Kb, then I want my freaking two hundred fifty-six kilobits — every last one of them. And I want them for every piece of the song: the silent parts, the loud parts, the complex and simple parts and everything in between.

Can I hear the difference under normal listening conditions? Nope. It’s the principle of the thing for me, a purist of process and product. I’ve spent literally hundreds of hours ripping and re-ripping my 1,200+ CD collection to get to my exact 256Kb AAC files. To know they cheaped out on me this way really sticks in my craw.

I know, I know… that’s weird. But that’s the way it be. Amazon won’t get any more sales from me except in “emergency” situations or when I just don’t care about the archivability of the audio.

Well, Amazon introduced their online MP3 store in beta this week. I just purchased my first album using the service. There are some pros and cons…

PROS

• No DRM lock-down on downloaded tracks, allowing you to move the music where you want.
• 256KB stereo bitrate on the MP3 files, ensuring a very-near-CD sound quality (I use the same 256KB bitrate when ripping CDs from my collection, although I create AAC files rather than MP3 files)
• Better prices than iTunes in most — if not all — cases (I got a complete album for $7 vs. $10)
• Automatically adds downloads to the iTunes library for you
• Leaves an additional copy of the MP3 file in an additional folder on your Mac, so you know which tracks to back up without having to think about it (this is a big bonus)
• Album art (nice, big images) integrated into each MP3 file

CONS

• Requires special downloading application (Windows and Mac versions available)
• Can’t add albums to a cart — must buy via “One Click” — which means that the purchase went to the wrong credit card in my case
• Just like iTunes or any other non-physical service, you have to backup your music yourself because you get no physical backup (original CD)
• Limited selection — quite limited so far, and some of the exclusions are weird as they’ll include one album from an artist, but none of the other 4 or 5 albums
• Search function inside Amazon is not so clean — I searched for an album title with the exact spelling and it said it couldn’t find it, but then presented the album in a list of “did you mean?” results. Huh?

In short, the store works and the prices and quality are good. It’s not as smooth as iTunes, but for $3+ I can sweat the details.

In any case, I still prefer buying physical CDs. Our collection is quite large and I rather like the collecting aspect — lots and lots of CDs all lined up and on display. Downloads don’t display on a shelf well.

So far, so good. I don’t mind that Apple has competition now. But the playing field is not yet level, as Universal has turned over the goods to Amazon but has locked out Apple intentionally, at least for now. In theory they are trying to squeeze Apple for some sales concessions (variable pricing, album-only sales, etc.). At least EMI is being a responsible new media player, providing the same un-DRMed tracks to both stores.

I look forward to seeing how this plays out. Ironically, this new service comes out in the same week I received three CDs from the old mail order BMG Music Club — CDs I ordered… wait for it… three months ago. Three CDs, three months delivery time. What are they doing… shipping quarterly? Morons.