Tried downloading some new music from Amazon for the first time in a while; Oh G-d, what a mistake. Experience as painful and complicated as I've ever experienced it, prices way up, the new resource-intensive downloader rife with examples of everything that is wrong with that trendy evil of 'flat design', and then, this crap with the Prime Library, wherein Amazon will gracefully give subscribers access to oh so many tracks, so long as they now and till the end of eternity maintain their payments to Amazon in order to access what they quaintly may have once seen as 'their library.' Da fuck ?
Like people can't use Pandora and their ilk ? Like most music isn't available for free on YouTube these days ? What's this shit about having to install & run special apps. to play Prime tracks ? Free is worth what you pay for it and all that, but the idea that people should pay you a premium to create a library, that is held in thrall to the temporal products of a company that could just as well choose to close up shop (or individual service -- like that's never happened in recent memory) tomorrow ? When they could get the same for
free elsewhere ? Or
buy and
own* from other services ?
After iTunes held back the market for
years on .mp3 sales with their over-priced DRM'd garbage, the introduction of relatively cheap DRM-free .mp3 tracks on Amazon, was the reason I finally took to seriously buying music by the track for the first time, having previously relied largely on CD's and on DRM-free subscription services like eMusic. Seems likes we're moonwalking backwards here. Fuck the cloud, fuck flat design, and fuck Amazon.
*(Oh hell, not going to get into the legalistics here of how the corporations will simply determine that they own content from now until the end of eternity, and that you are simply renting it from them. Cough. Microsoft. Cough.)
