Yes, every bad musical decision you (and others in your family!) have ever made, that you quietly dumped at a used record store right after college? Amazon is making sure that they come back to haunt you. All the cassette replacements for your dad who just would not stop listening to the f*cking Eagles. All the gifts you bought for teenage nieces and loving grandmothers. All the crappy Top 40 bands where you bought the album because you couldn’t get the song out of your head. There are a lot of people who never want to admit that they bought that album, but once it falls to Auto-Rip, they’ll get a reminder when they least expect it. We didn’t just badly photoshop Celine Dion into The Shining because it was funny: 1998 was when My Heart Will Go on shattered chart records and somehow drove Celine Dion to stop eating. Auto-Rip goes back to purchases made in 1998, and the late ’90s and early 2000s are pretty close to the Golden Era of Terrible Musical Decisions. Here, however, is our question: How many CDs did you buy from Amazon? Currently it’s limited to “thousands” of CDs. And apparently as the service expands, it’ll add MP3s to your cloud player. You can at least download the MP3s for listening elsewhere.
This is actually incredibly convenient, although also blatantly designed to drive people towards using Amazon’s Cloud Player. If you do not yet have a Cloud Player account, you can activate one for free. Albums eligible for this offer are marked on with an AutoRip logo. We mention this to you because Amazon is doing something very… curious with your purchase history.Īmazon has launched a program called “Auto Rip”, which essentially boils down to “You bought a CD? Great! Here’s the MP3s you’re just going to rip off of it anyway for free.”:Īfter 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.
As we mentioned in a brief autopsy of the music industry’s terrible year, 2012 was a bad, bad year for physical media with music stored on it, and a great year for MP3s.
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