Auto Ripping Yarns

Amazon are pushing to get a larger slice of the cloud business by offering a new service, unfortunately only available in the US at the moment, where a large number of music CDs can be added to your Amazon cloud for free.  From there you can listen to the music on your smartphone, tablet computer, laptop - you name it, if it has internet access and can play sound, you got it.  The new service is called Auto Rip.

Is there a catch?  Well, yes and no.  The service is free, so there's no cost, and it covers the 50,000 most popular CDs sold by Amazon in its fourteen years of trading. So it's possible that there are some CDs you'd like in your cloud that they haven't listed yet.  There's one other requirement - you need to have bought the CD from Amazon sometime during that fourteen years.

They've sold a lot of CDs in that period and clearly they are good at record keeping - I know if I look at my Amazon account I can check my purchases in recent months, but hadn't realised that they kept all these records indefinitely.

I assume that Amazon have cleared this initiative with the owners of the music, the artists and record companies, because I can see a flaw in the concept that benefits those of us who have used Amazon to buy presents for others - and let's face it, who hasn't?  So those CDs I bought my wife, my daughter, my brothers and sisters and those I bought the olds over the years, I guess that if Amazon roll this out to the UK then I can add those to my cloud.  Because I don't see how Amazon can tell who I've bought for.  Mind you, I'm not sure I want Dirty Dancing Soundtracks or The Spice Girls in my cloud either, so perhaps they have thought this through.

In fact the real weakness is that a lot of us don't treat ourselves that much, we tend to treat others.  A lot of my CD collection has been built up by me dropping shameless hints before my birthday and Christmas with the odd CD arriving on Fathers' Day.  So the majority of my CDs, regardless of where they were bought, weren't bought by me.  So, apart from those people who buy all their own music, and buy it from Amazon, it could be a bit of a limited offer.

However, I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth and if and when Amazon roll this out in the UK I'll take a look at my list of Amazon bought CDs.  I may even add the Spice Girls just to start the cloud off.

The next step, not announced by Amazon, maybe not even considered by them, could be to extend the idea to books.  When they started trading fourteen years ago their business was books, the music, games, washing machines and computers came later.  Now I'm struggling to recall which CDs I've bought from Amazon over the years - CD Wow and Play probably saw more of my cash than Amazon did - but I have bought books from them.  Now, with the increasing digitisation of books taking place it would be interesting to see if I would be allowed to download the digital eBook version of books I've bought from Amazon in their short history.

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