For several years now, I’ve been complaining about the need to pay twice for music if you want it in multiple formats. For example, I’ve got a reasonable selection of vinyl, but when CDs came out, they told us that we needed to upgrade to CDs for ‘superior quality’. (And now, ironically, they are marketing vinyl as the ‘purists’ medium!). I didn’t go out and replace all of my vinyl immediately, because I recognized it for the scam it was. The record companies and the artists have already had my money once for the purchase of the album – why should I have to pay again for the same music, just because I want it (or they want me to want it…) in a different format? But, over the years, I have ended up replacing a fair amount of my vinyl with CD equivalents (well, maybe 100 of them), mainly for the convenience of being able to rip them to my iPod and have them literally ‘to hand’ wherever I was.
In the past five or six years, just as vinyl has given way to CD (we’ll skip quickly over cassette tapes…), CDs have given way to MP3s. But despite the fact that the first thing I do with a CD that I purchase is rip it to MP3, I’ve still resolutely stuck to buying CDs, instead of just buying the MP3s. Call me old-fashioned, but I like to be able to touch what I’ve paid for, to fondle and fetish the artwork, maybe read the lyrics, or check the credits to see who the sound engineer was (and squeal with delight when I see that it was Steve Albini). Plus, despite it now taking me several large boxes every time I move house, I like having the CDs in case my hard disk (and backup NAS) fail and I have to re-rip everything all over again (although I think I’d pay some intern to do it for me should that prove necessary – there must be a business model there?)
This week, Amazon brought us one step closer to my musical nirvana by announcing their Autorip feature. With Autorip, Amazon will automatically give you free MP3 versions of many of the CDs that you have bought from Amazon since 1998, and automatically add these to your Amazon ‘cloud’ (Incidentally, why is everything ‘the cloud’, these days? It used to just be called ‘the Internet’. it’s the same thing, peoples!) Admittedly, this currently only applies to their ‘biggest selling’ 50,000 albums (Amazon refer to their selection as ‘Autorip-enabled’ albums to make sure you understand that this doesn’t cover everything), but I’m sure that before long all of their albums will be covered in this way. And why not? It’s not costing Amazon anything to do this. They already have all of the MP3s on their servers – all they are doing is providing you (the customer) with a link to the same physical files. It’s not even like they are losing potential revenue, as the ‘autoripped’ MP3s are only being made available to customers who have purchased the CD, and none of those customers would have bought the MP3s separately when they could just rip their CD themselves.
Out of this initial round of 50,000 albums, Amazon matched exactly 100 of my purchases, dating back to August 2000. This included such gems as The Fool by Warpaint, and Strange Land by Yellow Ostrich, so clearly Amazon are stretching their definition of ‘biggest selling’. Either that, or I am – perish the thought – getting more mainstream in my tastes. The downside is that Amazon also matched a further dozen or so albums that I’d bought as gifts for various people. Uno!, Dos!, and Tre! by Green Day (bought for my son) I can live with, but I had to delete the Taylor Swift and One Direction that I bought for my daughter before they started polluting my indie credentials that I’ve carefully built up by only buying music by bands who score at least 98% on The Obscurometer.
But autoripping your historical purchases is only the beginning. Today I bought another CD (The Temper Trap by The Temper Trap), and was happy to discover that this is ‘Autorip enabled’, which meant that I could download the MP3s immediately, and not have to wait for the CD to arrive and rip it myself. (Of course, one could then argue why I bother with the CD, but see my earlier comments.) And Amazon’s autodownloader handily downloads the purchase and imports it into my iTunes library in a single click (see, Apple – it is possible to play nicely with competing platforms!)
Furthermore, Amazon is not insisting that these purchases count toward your ‘cloud limit’, which is nice. And entirely correct, because – as noted earlier – this does not require extra storage space (save an entry in a database mapping my account to the MP3 file). The 5GB of ‘cloud storage’ they give you can then freely be used for songs that you didn’t buy from Amazon (or that Amazon don’t already provide Autorip for). Although I buy probably 95% of my music from Amazon (being a Prime member certainly helps – or at least keeps me within the Amazon fold), there is probably significantly more than 5GB worth of albums that I didn’t get from Amazon. I’m sure that Amazon will want me to upload those and start paying for ‘premium membership’, which given my collection will be the maxed out $24.99 per year for 250,000 songs. Which I’m unlikely to ‘take advantage of’ because I don’t like paying for something I already own. I guess you could argue that I’m paying for storage space and not the music, but still, it’s the principle of the thing. Now if they offered to give me MP3s of all of the vinyl that I own, we’d be in business…
But after all is said and done, this autorip thingy is a still an important step. Amazon are basically saying that you have purchased the music, and not just the physical object (the CD). Which is exactly how I’ve been saying for years that it should be. Of course, their aim is to get you using their ‘cloud player’ – which I don’t tend to do as I already have all of my music on my iPod. But if I forget to take my iPod into work, I can at least listen to (currently) 101 of my albums via Amazon Cloud Player. And thankfully, the chumps in the IT department haven’t blocked Amazon.com as they have every other music streaming site. Although I’m sure that’s only a matter of time, but by then hopefully I’ll have my Kindle Fire HD 4G, and can just stream everything from there…
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