The Best of the 1970’s, part of The 20th Century Masters Millennium Collection, is now available on MP3 format from Amazon this month for only $5.00. (The CD is currently $6.77 and is an AutoRip, which means with the CD purchase you’ll also get a FREE MP3 download of the entire album.)

At first quick glance, with its garishly colored cover, replete with appropriate 70s-esque font and the silhouetted shot of bell-bottomed people “getting down,” one would think that this album spans the disco/kitschy end of the 1970’s spectrum, but not so with this collection. Spanning from 1970 (with Edwin Scott’s urgent, explosive plea for ending global combat with the funky “War”) to 1976 (Nice Guy Finishes First guitar virtuoso Peter Frampton doing the voice box vox on the pop classic “Show Me The Way”), The Best of the 70’s contains 12 songs that run the gamut that while were hits and remain for the most part radio and pop cultural classics, (Rod Stewart’s lovely and pendulum swing of folk and rock blends “Maggie May,” Three Dog Night’s anthemic “Joy to the World,” Southern Fried Rock with Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama,” or the political yet accessible to all “Wild World” and “What’s Going On”, by Cat Stevens and Marvin Gaye respectively) are also finely crafted slices of a musical era where things were reflected by a time in history that was still hungover from the fallout of a 1960s that pushed and pushed and pushed. By the time most of these songs were released, those times were rife with a sort of a collective impotence, but the music retained and foraged a vitality that made it memorable and a perfect aural reflection of a decade that on the surface seemed carefree and innocuous, but in reality, was anything but. Kind of like the music.

Browse hundreds of albums on sale this month for only $5 each!

Track Listing

1. What’s Going On – Marvin Gaye
2. Wild World – Cat Stevens
3. Sweet Home Alabama – Lynyrd Skynyrd
4. Maggie May – Rod Stewart
5. War – Edwin Starr
6. I Shot The Sheriff – Eric Clapton
7. Show Me The Way – Peter Frampton
8. Daniel – Elton John
9. Midnight Train To Georgia – Gladys Knight & The Pips
10. ABC – Jackson 5
11. Joy To The World – Three Dog Night
12. American Pie – Don McLean

MP3 Purchases: When you purchase MP3s through Amazon, it stores your purchases to Amazon’s Cloud Drive; from there you can stream the music right from their online player. Also, if you have a Kindle Fire, your MP3 purchases will automatically be available for you to stream on your device. All your purchases are backed up and available for you to download at any time. You can download the files to your computer to load to an MP3 device and to your iTunes account if you have one. If you’d like to gift these MP3 purchases, you can – just click the “Give album or song as gift” button on the right on the product page. From there you enter the recipient’s email address and then select either specific songs to gift or the entire album.

CD AutoRip Purchases: After you complete a purchase of an AutoRip CD, a free MP3 version of that album will be added to your Amazon Cloud Player library and will be available on your PC/Mac, Kindle Fire, Android phone, iPhone & iPod Touch, and iPad. Albums eligible for this offer are marked on Amazon.com with an AutoRip logo. If you do not yet have a Cloud Player account, you can activate one for free. Available to US customers only.