This is about buying mp3 music tracks. I don't stream music by subscription. I want to buy and download an actual track, so that I can install it on my current phone, and (importantly) pass it on to future devices.
Over the last ten years or so, Amazon became my main source of the 'old' music. I have been creating the 'soundtrack to my life', building on a smaller collection that I'd ripped from CDs some years back.
I've bought a lot of mp3 tracks from Amazon all told. I've been looking for music from the 1960s onwards. But also music from even earlier decades that has come to my attention. You know: Gracie Fields, Glen Miller, whatever.
Altogether, I presently have very nearly 1,800 digital tracks on my phone, covering the 1920s through to the present day. Most tracks, however, belong to the twenty golden years from 1962 to 1982, when music creativity was at its height. The most exciting era ever for music, whatever the genre.
By now I've got most of what I want. But it's still worth searching for more.
Until recently I could search Amazon's digital music archive, locate what I wanted, listen to a 30-second excerpt to make certain that this was really the song I wanted, and the right version, then if all seemed OK I'd buy it, and immediately download it to my phone from the Amazon Music App. Once downloaded, I could play the track offline on my phone - or since last year, on my JBL speaker, bluetoothed from my phone.
I got very used to this search-buy-and-download routine. Every month I'd spend maybe a tenner on tracks I had found that I ought to include in my personal collection.
But I can't do it any more.
Amazon must have a new broom in their organisation, someone who has come up with a new money-making idea. It effectively stops me buying mp3 tracks from them, because I can't listen before I buy. This may not matter if I know for certain that it's the right track. But if not, I don't want to buy it and then find I've made a mistake. It'll only be 99p down the drain. But these little amounts mount up. And if millions of people like me are buying blind, and each waste 99p again and again, then Amazon will make even more money. I begrudge it to them.
Surely you must be able to listen before buying, you ask? No longer, unless you have a subscription. I'll take you through a search. It's for a track called Elenore by the mid-1960s group The Turtles, typical of what I want in my personal, offline collection.
I'm in the main Amazon shopping app, and type in what I'm looking for.
The results come up, just as they always have before.
But what's that? Listen with Music Unlimited? That's something new. I tap on the version I want.
Right. So it's 99p to buy, the usual price. But I'd like to hear it first. Until quite recently, I could tap on the name of the song and hear 30 seconds of it. But that's no longer possible. There's that blue button, though, which suggests I can tap on it and be taken through to Amazon's Music App, and hear the song there. So I tap the blue button. And this is what I get.
Looks good, although this isn't as convenient as the old way. I now tap on the 'Listen with the App' button.
