Amazon’s AutoRip

I have been meaning to get to this since last month, but a recent purchase reminded me of Amazon Autorip.

If you have ordered nearly any CD from Amazon — as far back as 1998 — then you should have access to digital versions of the songs in your Amazon cloud player. I was surprised to learn my Amazon cloudplayer has 2,224 songs off of 181 albums from 269 artists.

Here’s what Amazon emails after your purchase:

“The CD you purchased is AutoRip eligible. This means that the MP3 version of the album is now available for you to play or download from Amazon Cloud Player for FREE.

When you buy any CD with the AutoRip logo, you’ll instantly get the MP3 version of that album delivered to your Cloud Player library for FREE. You can listen to your album everywhere, including on any Android phone, iPhone, iPod touch, Kindle Fire and other devices.”

The claim is over 50,000 albums  are eligible.

I grabbed a disc to give to someone (Windham Hill 25 Years of Guitar: Touch)  and lo and behold, it was available instantly in my Amazon cloud player. Free online versions of ripped MP3s ready to stream and all I did was buy a disc. My office’s bandwidth is spotty– web videos play poorly — but the audio from Amazon’s cloud was clean and played flawlessly. Color me impressed.

Does AutoRip put Amazon into competition with Apple? Indirectly, yes. Amazon provides those of us who want a physical copy of a disc with they atoms but recognizes the futures is bits and bytes — so they give that to us as well. Stream or download or both. Nice. 

As long as they are going after Apple, they might as well do the same with DVDs — give me a digital web version as well – and they can after Netflix.

Its one thing to go after a small under funded start up — Let’s see if any of the labels end up suing the web retailing giant.

 

 

 

 

 

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