How NOT to Sell MP3s 
I recently came across the band 3 on last.fm and absolutely love them. I managed to find all of their albums via torrents, but I thought I would actually buy their stuff since they aren’t on an RIAA label. Their website didn’t help at all and CDBaby didn’t have any of their stuff. I was about to give up when I thought I’d give Amazon a try. Turns out, it was a good idea; Amazon had all of their albums available for sale. But, that’s also where the problem came in.
Their oldest album, Paint by Number, was only available as an mp3 download. In order to buy mp3s from Amazon, you have to download THEIR software. “Crap,” I thought, “they always do this and the software never runs in Linux!” But to my surprise, theirs did! I’d still prefer a normal download link, but whatever, I installed it just to check it out. They give you a free mp3 to try the software out, and it worked just fine. “Great, now I can buy the album I want!”
Of course, their webpage kept kicking me off the album I was trying to buy and I had to keep pulling it back in from my history. And the album page lacked a way to purchase the WHOLE thing, I had to hunt that down from the band’s album list page. How any normal person (ie. my parents, or, GASP, my grandparents) is supposed to buy mp3s from Amazon is beyond me!
Despite all these problems, I finally had a “Buy MP3 Album” link and I was ready to go. I clicked on it and it verified that I would be purchasing the album. “Awesome, here we go,” I thought, thinking I would be taken to the checkout process and be given this magical file which would download the album through the download software I just installed. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Instead, I was greeted with a page saying that the order failed and that I had to do one of the following:
- Verify or update your 1-click billing address in the “Payment Settings” section of Your Account. (with a link)
- Retry with the existing credit card. (no idea what this means, I tried 3 times and got the same errors)
- Choose a different payment method from your account. (the one useful tip, with no indication of HOW i would do that!)
- Enter a new payment method. (Again, no link, no idea how!!!!)
They did have a link to their Help pages, which had all kinds of information on the Kindle 2, tracking my shipment, etc. No indication of how I buy mp3s without 1-click billing enabled or “[c]hoose a different payment method.” Needless to say, this crap is unusable! I’ve uninstalled their software, vowed to never buy mp3s from their site (not that I could if I wanted to, which I did) and I’ll no go out of my way to buy the physical discs from some other site, whether they’re available on Amazon or not.
This is exactly how NOT to sell mp3s. With processes like this, it’s no wonder at all why nobody can cut in to Apple’s market, no matter how over-priced and under-featured their players are and how terrible their iTunes software is!
March 16th, 2009 at 9:51 am
Hrm, I’ve actually had nothing but a great experience buying MP3’s off of Amazon. Maybe it’s just ’cause I was on a mac at the time, but I never had to install any sort of software. Buying the songs were actually so easy that I bought one by mistake: I clicked “buy” assuming it would ask me to verify (so I could preview the song), when in-fact the preview link was just on the same page. Needless to say I “1-click bought” that song without even knowing it.
Sorry to hear about your troubles, but with Amaazon being one of the only good quality and pure DRM free places (at least that I’m aware of), I’m not sure I’d give up on it just yet.
March 16th, 2009 at 10:56 am
If it worked, I’d use it. I was all ready to plunk down my cash right there, but it wouldn’t let me. Part of the problem is that I don’t use 1-click checkout, which they seem to rely on for mp3s. I refuse to use it because I don’t need to accidentally buy anything, I like the whole checkout process. The options would seem to indicate that I could buy the mp3s without the 1-click option, but they offer no help on setting it up.
March 16th, 2009 at 11:47 am
Same here. Big fan of Amazon. I haven’t tried in linux yet. But most of my downloads go onto the macmini anyway. I also use one-click, though.
March 16th, 2009 at 4:13 pm
It’s not a Linux/software issue. I can download music with amz files just fine, the free test mp3 worked perfectly. The problem is, I can’t pay for mp3s on their site. Either I need to enable 1-click buying (which I don’t want to do) or “[c]hoose a different payment method.” (which I can’t figure out how to do). This has nothing to do with Linux, iTunes or whatever, it’s purely and checkout/payment problem.