Tue 25 Sep 2007
I was quite excited when I woke up this morning to find that Amazon had launched their MP3 store. You can buy decent-quality songs or albums in delightfully non-DRM’d format for very reasonable prices.
I even found an album that I was interested in getting which was part of the labels they are currently offering on the store. When I clicked through to the details, they had an “also available on CD” link so I checked that out… and sure enough the CD price is actually cheaper. ($7.99 for the CD vs $8.99 for the MP3s)
I even have “free” 2-day shipping with Amazon Prime, so it would be kind of stupid for me to actually pay more money for less quality on this. But it seems like such a waste to order a CD with all that packaging for something I’m just going to file away on a shelf somewhere.
September 26th, 2007 at 10:05am
I too was excited with the new option - however, for those of us without
crackAmazon habits that necessitate Amazon Prime the shipping charges and weeks of waiting aren’t really worth it for the physical CD. I’ll even consider paying a premium for “now”.And I did. But I got “later”. You can download individual tracks directly from the Amazon MP3 page, but to buy albums, you’re instructed to download and install their download manager . So I do, because I wanted a David Bowie album. Now. Of course, for some reason, their download manager can’t traverse the network here at my work - and has no options for me to properly setup a proxy. So I didn’t get it. And I forgot to download at home last night, so again, no Bowie for me today.
This is me, making a farting noise at Amazon. Fix your stuff. Do it quick-like, and I’ll buy a ton of music.
As for the packaging issue, I’d prefer to pay less for the non-packaged version, but either way, I still want less packaging in my life, so I’d still buy the MP3 version instead of the physical CD - even if I had Amazon Prime.