Joe Public

The Commoditization of Music

I too spent all of my accumulated points (far fewer than your total) in the last couple of days of the promotion. The promotion worked, as we did buy Pepsi over Coke just to get another point per 2-liter bottle. I had never used the Amazon MP3 store before, and I was generally pleased with the experience. I wish you could buy more than one song at a time. All the downloads I bought were encoded at 256 kbps. I had to convert them to 160 kbps so they would play on my MP3 player.

I can't believe you never bought Dark Side of the Moon on CD. You are one of the few, I think.

I refuse to buy DRMed songs, so I was happy to give Amazon a try. I expect to go back and buy some more songs on my own dime.

As far as buying music from other sources, don't forget eBay and half.ebay.com for used CDs. Also, there is a site called lala.com where you can buy "web access" to songs for 10 cents each, and often whole albums are available for less than $1. "Web access" means that you can log on to the web site and listen to the entire song or album (streamed) as often as you want whenever you want - so long as lala.com stays in business, I guess. To entice you to buy a song, you can listen to the entire song for free once. After that, it's the usual 30 second sample. You can also buy MP3 downloads from them, and there is a CD trading feature as well. I have had a (free) user account on lala for a couple of years for CD trading, but have not yet used the web access feature.