Music Discussions

I want to start off by saying that I do not have problems with the MP3s themselves; MP3s that I have downloaded have always played correctly and have been of high quality. I do however have issues with their service.

One weekend about a month ago, I downloaded an album but forgot to put it in a folder on my home computer that I have access to at work. Thus, I could not listen to it on Monday. Typically, this isn’t an issue as I have an SMB share that I can access through a VPN and I copy files to it; however, I forgot to copy these MP3’s to the share. I went to Amazon’s site to redownload them and discovered that they wanted to charge me again.

So, basically they charged me more per track than eMusic would have and then try to charge me again to redownload somthing that I’ve already paid for. You may ask why I downloaded the album from Amazon instead of eMusic in the first place; unfortunately, eMusic did not have this album in their catalog yet.

Amazon should seriously consider changing this policy with regards to redownloading as it is detrimental to their customers and is not helping them to stay competitive with some of the other extant services. This may be less of an issue for me in the future anyway as eMusic just added a quarter of a million new tracks this month. But, for Amazon, this does potentially mean even less of my business for music purchases. I welcome responses from Amazon as to why this is currently their policy and any plans they have in the future to make their service more user-friendly.