The battle for music selling supremacy has never been tougher at the top with a number of large profile outlets all vying against one another to capture the hearts, and of course the wallets, of consumers. It wasn’t that long ago when we all happily amassed huge collections of music on physical storage mediums like CDs, but times have changed a lot, thanks to the introduction of digital downloads. In an attempt to gain some interest and boost their own music sales; Amazon has introduced a new service known as AutoRip that is an amalgamation of the physical and digital.
When we buy music stored on CDs from the likes of Amazon or other retailers, the chances are that one of the first things we do is rip the music to our computers to put onto MP3 players or just have them permanently stored on a hard drive. The Amazon AutoRip service is essentially a new offering from the online behemoth to cut out that ripping requirement at home by providing an instant digital copy of any purchased and compatible music CD.
It all sounds like good news for those music lovers who regularly purchase music CDs from Amazon, but things even get that little bit better. Amazon is retrospectively applying the service to all compatible music titles that have been purchased by consumers dating back to 1998, meaning that those users will automatically find the digital version of the CD in their Amazon Cloud Player library.
At the time of writing, there were more than 50,000 supported titles available for purchase that offer the AutoRip service, spanning across a wide range of musical genres and published through some of the largest record labels in the world. Those who are rifting through the Amazon website will be able to see the AutoRip logo appearing next to compatible purchases.
Although, the digital versions of the purchases are added to the Amazon Cloud Player library, they are accessible through web browsers as well as a number of more personal mobile devices including Apple’s iOS powered hardware. It’s entirely unknown whether or not the introduction of AutoRip will entice people away from using competing companies like Apple to purchase their music, but it certainly won’t harm Amazon’s reputation in the music game.
(Source: Amazon)
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