Amazon, I apologise

Ah. I now see what Amazon have done. They've rearranged and redesigned their music offerings, and in the process the place where you can peruse old music, listen to 30 seconds of any mp3 track, and then purchase it, has been buried inside their Amazon Music app. 

I have to say, it took some finding. But it is there. And because I have found this out and can buy old tracks just as I used to, I feel I must apologise to Amazon for giving them a lot of stick. I'm not going to grovel, because the facility I wanted is not flagged up in any way, and isn't in their regular Amazon shopping app as it used to be. It's almost as if Amazon didn't want me to find it. But I can undeniably listen before I buy, which is what I thought they had stopped me doing. 

Here are the stages you have to go through.

First, you need to have installed the Amazon Music app on your phone. Here it is on the 'Music app' screen of my phone.

You fire it up, and tap on the three vertical dots (top right), choosing 'Store' from the drop-down menu, then 'Store Home' after that:

This brings you to the Home screen of the Music Store. Tapping on the magnifying-glass icon (top right) lets you type in what you're looking for. 

Here we are at the album in the previous post. Just a bit different from the other approach. Amazon give me a 'Go Unlimited ' option, which means a £9.99 monthly subscription, but nothing else to pay no matter how much music I listen to on this app. Or I can buy the entire album in mp3 form for £6.49. Or else scroll down to chose a particular track, or tracks, at 99p a pop. So I scroll down to Elenore. 

The grey circles around the track numbers (left edge) indicate pre-purchase listening time, so I tap against Elenore and listen to the music. Just as I used to do. Yep. It's the track I want.

If I now tap the box with '£0.99' on it, the 'BUY SONG' option now comes up. 

Tapping on that completes the purchase. Just as before. And, just as before, I can go to another part of the Amazon Music app and view (and play) what I've bought, which is now up in the Amazon cloud and will remain there for eons to come, till all mountains have washed into the sea, and Amazon is no more. But at any time I can download the track as a proper mp3 music file and install it on my phone - which I do at once - and it will get backed up to an external hard drive when I next do a regular Music Backup. In that way, I can play it offline whenever the fit takes me. Or copy it to another device. 

This new arrangement is actually better than the old, because it's all done from the Amazon Music app, and not kicked off on the ordinary Amazon shopping app first. Though maybe this was always possible, and I just never knew before. 

So there you are. I was wrong to castigate Amazon so much. Although I still don't trust them.