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About LinkBacksRead more.Service is retrospective; any CD you have bought from Amazon since 1998 is included!
Read more.Service is retrospective; any CD you have bought from Amazon since 1998 is included!
Utterly agree - and at the prices that Amazon can do CD album's for I can't see any real reason (other than impatience) why I'd go for a download-only album.All of your Amazon AutoRip music will be available to Cloud compatible smartphones, tablets and PCs (as well as simply being downloadable) you will also own the physical CD media, packaging, artwork etc. It sounds like the best of both worlds...
Fingers crossed that AmazonUK are lobbying hard to get this as soon as possible! After all, that might go a little way to making up for the bad press they got over their tax "management" activities.So far the service is only for US residents and we have no information about when it will come to UK customers.
That said, I can't see HMV being pleased as this'll surely hit their sales (again).
Career status: still enjoying my new career in DevOps, but it's keeping me busy...
i've seen a few people over the years say they would like an option where you buy a CD and on release date (if bought in advance) or purchase day you can download the album and listen to it immediately before the CD arrives in the post. so like the old days of buying a record in a store and taking it home for immediate playback, no 2 or 3 day wait to hear it. so this sounds interesting. they could then offer CD+download for one price, and download only at a cheaper price, as some won't want/need or even care about the physical disc, so no point in wasting resources mailing bits of plastic about to people who won't use them for anything other than a dust magnet, although some could rip the cd and sell the cd on ebay, illegal, but i'm sure people do that with cds and dvds etc these days, perhaps not that many as a big pirate would just download before release day without bothering about paying for anything, so not a huge piracy issue
Part of the problem with a UK version of this will be the differences in UK and US copyright law, because the provisions over personal and domestic copies are different.
So, to provide this sort of a service, Amazon are either having to utilise differences in those laws, or negotiate licence specific agreements with the rights holders for all CD's covered, which I assume is why it only applies to specific CD's.
There are regular discussions about UK law and personal format-shifted copies of material you own, and provisions on that in the UK and US are certainly differently implemented.
In short, while we might end up getting the same service, I'm not holding my breath.
Also, of course, while it's a good idea, all it really means is that Amazon are doing something for the buyer that, until now, the buyer has been doing for him/herself, whether doing it is legal or not.
One question I have would be about the quality of the MP3 provided, because as anyone that's every done any audio work, even something as simple as ripping an MP3, it's nowhere near as simple as a black-box process where you just feed audio source in one end and identical MP3's come out the other end. In reality, the quality of the MP3 varies dramatically according to the settings, and even the algorithms in whatever converter you use. So are Amazon going to be going for ultimate fidelity, or cheap, cheerful, quick and small?
Frankly, I'd rather just see a simple and long-promised change to copyright law so I can produce my own MP3's, to my own needs. And, by the way, what if I want the MP3 but want to buy the CD somewhere other than Amazon? Changes to copyright law would do that, but retailers other than Amazon may well not have the market clout to negotiate the rights deals that Amazon appear to havd done.
So you could have sold you entire CD collection but amazon has no idea and will still give you an mp3 copy... hmm. I can't imagine UK law being this loose.
Although you could flip it on it's head and say you buy the cd and the right to a digital copy. When you've sold it you've only given them the CD.
What about gifts? If I buy a cd as a present I get their digital copy?
It's all a bit messy isn't it.
The 2nd hand issue is one of the potential arguments for keeping it illegal to rip. I'm of the opinion that if you sell a CD you should delete any ripped files, but there is no way to enforce that.
All true enough, but on the enforcement issue, nothing much has changed since the introduction of compact cassette recorders in, what, late 60's, and VCR's a decade or so later .... which is to say, it might be illegal to make home copies, but it's all but unenforceable because you the rights owners don't know when it's been done, can almost never prove it, and even if they do know and could prove it, for one-off personal copies, tne legal remedies are extremely limited. This is, of course, a very different situation from the much more recent phenomenon of not just making a copy of your disk for your own use, but of uploading it to the net. Then, the potential penalties can be FAR. more dramatic.Originally Posted by krazy_olie
Absolutely. In fact, whilst I purchase a lot of CDs from Amazon, I would never be interested in this feature because I'd rather have a FLAC.
But, in Amazon's favour, they were one of the first major providers to focus on quality MP3s, distributing in 320kbps, so hopefully they would continue the trend with this service.
This is good news - I see this as expanding the competition between Google/Amazon and Apple for their matching/streaming service. sure it's more than that, but thats where I see this being a "big thing" and a draw to expand usage of those services.
For that same reason I don't think there is likely to be a massive legal issue when this comes to the UK - iTunes match already goes much further by effectively legitimising your entire MP3 collection and replacing any illegal/unlicensed MP3s with (relatively) high quality, legal versions. I am still surprised that they are even able to do that - Amazon are stretching this idea but not by much.
Increasing competition in this area is only a good thing - I made the jump to iTunes match just before christmas and have not looked back (you can't underestimate how great it is to have access to 20k tracks on the move with 4G..it has replaced radio for me in my car) but I can easily see how I would look to use multiple providers in sync with each other, especially as Apple has this 20k limit.
Looking forward to this launching in the UK(if it does)
This is all well and good but I honestly dont know anyone that actually buys music anymore. I am not condoning music theft or piracy but if I hear a song on the radio and I like it I just go straight to YT and it'll be there.
Any music I do have has been put onto my phone and I can listen to it at will. I dont remember the last time I bought a CD or paid for music, thats what YT is for.
MP3s may be the mass-market choice, but I still don't get why companies like Amazon are so set against other formats or containers.
Storage aside, what harm would it possibly do their business to start offering music in lossless wave format with the option to transcode on demand to any other format of your choice with full tagging/labelling for you to download (i.e., .m4a, .aac, .ogg [Vorbis-encoded], .wma, .flac, .ape, .alac, .wv etc.)?
Well storage probably is one of the main issues, along with bandwidth. They'd need around 3 times their current storage capacity. And if they were going to start encoding it themselves, they'd also need the server power to make it happen, which is no mean feat on a massive scale.
Just offering FLAC would be a start, but I doubt it'll happen any time soon as it's not a popular format.
Know what you mean but other folks have a problem with data limits (e.g. I'm on 1.5GB/month and I'm pretty sure that streaming any reasonable amount would demolish that) or even getting a data signal (there's places in the England/Scotland border where I can even get a DAB signal never mind a 3G one).
YT? YouTube? In which case that's not a particularly good source of music in my book. Too many poor quality tracks.
I thought Amazon were offering a storage service, in which case if you wanted a weird format (i.e. anything other than MP3) couldn't they use spare capacity in EC2 to do the transcode and stuff the resulting files into your storage area, emailing you when it was complete. Seems like a good use of "spare" capacity.
Career status: still enjoying my new career in DevOps, but it's keeping me busy...
@Crossy:
Yes I mean YouTube, some videos have poor quality audio I agree however most popular song that you will hear on the radio or on TV or just in general normally have there own channel and its pretty decent quality, usually 128kbps. I just dont see a need anymore to spend money on music when you can stream it for free at will.
Like I said its a great idea but I honestly cant see it being used much, I dont know anyone that has bought a CD or paid for music in years and im not just talking about piracy.
Unless it's uploaded by the record label then I imagine youtube counts as piracy.
I buy loads of CDs, usually less than a fiver each. If everyone stopped paying for music there wouldn't be any to listen to.
For the transcode, sure. I was talking about the lossless issue - that would increase size required by a factor of about 3, and that would be a permanent requirement in addition to any spare capacity.
Yes thats what I was getting at, most popular songs you hear now have been uploaded by an official channel/label. As to the ones that aren't im not sure about the law and piracy but YT is filled with them surely if it was piracy then they would have been taken down? I assumed it was legal until you downloaded it and kept it as opposed to streaming it. Im not sure though.
Not all artists are in it for the money, I know A LOT are but I listen to a few groups/bands/producers what have you that publicly release there music on YT free to DL and even provide a 3rd party link to it.
Like I said, its a great idea however I think its a little too late to get used by people as much as they'd hope. Perhaps if this was available before Napster made its first round then it could have really hit off.
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