BBC news has an interesting article on it today about a new feature from Amazon: AutoRip. The long and short of it is that when you buy a CD or vinyl Amazon will throw in the mp3 files free of charge. It is a really interesting idea. The best part of this is that it is retroactive - all the CDs that you have ever bought through Amazon are available via Amazon Cloud Player to stream or to download.
The feature could be really handy is you have ever bought a CD, loaned it to a friend and then never seen the CD again. On the flip side, as Rory Cellan-Jones points out, "this could be rather scary - Amazon started selling CDs in the UK back in 1999, and you may find the evidence of your past musical tastes rather distressing".
It does pose some interesting questions regarding ownership though; when I log into my account I see the 9 CDs that I have purchased through Amazon, 3 of these I bought as gifts. Obviously Amazon has no way of knowing that I bought them to give away, but it seems a little bit odd that they should assume that I still own all the CDs.
I also wonder how far this will go. I would love to see the same rolled across to book purchases; buy a physical book and get the Kindle edition thrown in for free, or get a video file for each BluRay, DVD or maybe even VHS that you have bought. I really hope this is just the beginning.
Post changelog
- 2020-05-17 – Remove old insecure image references, hotlinks, etc
- 2020-05-17 – Decouple gulp from SCSS generation
- 2018-12-24 – Generate (but not use yet) RWD images
- 2018-09-01 – Importing all the old blog posts
