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Amazon introduces AutoRip CD service in USA

by Mark Tyson on 11 January 2013, 10:22

Tags: Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN)

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A new service for Amazon customers in the US debuted yesterday. It’s called AutoRip and it means that, on an eligible selection of CDs, when you buy a music CD you will automatically get the digital version for free. The eligible selection is quite vast, I found some of my favourite obscure late 1980s CDs in there, and also the service is retrospective back to 1998, so many CDs you have purchased from Amazon before will now be available for you download or stream.

The AutoRip service, now live in the US, automatically adds your purchased CD music to the Amazon Cloud Player and lets you download tracks as 256kbps MP3s. CDs that are included in the AutoRip service have the AutoRip logo next to them and you can filter your CD music searches on Amazon to include the AutoRip feature.

If you have already signed up for an Amazon Cloud Drive you will be aware of the free 5GB of storage provided with that service. However the AutoRip service won’t start chomping away towards those data limits because Amazon will provide extra space for your AutoRip CDs at no extra charge.

Amazon hopes this service will help spur people to maintain a CD collection, bought from Amazon, and not give up on physical media for other services like iTunes. All of your Amazon AutoRip music will be available to Cloud compatible smartphones, tablets and PCs (as well as simply being downloadable) you will also own the physical CD media, packaging, artwork etc. It sounds like the best of both worlds...

So far the service is only for US residents and we have no information about when it will come to UK customers.

HEXUS Forums :: 17 Comments

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Posted by crossy - Fri 11 Jan 2013 10:32
All of your Amazon AutoRip music will be available to Cloud compatible smartphones, tablets and PCs (as well as simply being downloadable) you will also own the physical CD media, packaging, artwork etc. It sounds like the best of both worlds…
Utterly agree - and at the prices that Amazon can do CD album's for I can't see any real reason (other than impatience) why I'd go for a download-only album.
So far the service is only for US residents and we have no information about when it will come to UK customers.
Fingers crossed that AmazonUK are lobbying hard to get this as soon as possible! After all, that might go a little way to making up for the bad press they got over their tax “management” activities. :rolleyes:

That said, I can't see HMV being pleased as this'll surely hit their sales (again).
Posted by Unique - Fri 11 Jan 2013 11:36
i've seen a few people over the years say they would like an option where you buy a CD and on release date (if bought in advance) or purchase day you can download the album and listen to it immediately before the CD arrives in the post. so like the old days of buying a record in a store and taking it home for immediate playback, no 2 or 3 day wait to hear it. so this sounds interesting. they could then offer CD+download for one price, and download only at a cheaper price, as some won't want/need or even care about the physical disc, so no point in wasting resources mailing bits of plastic about to people who won't use them for anything other than a dust magnet, although some could rip the cd and sell the cd on ebay, illegal, but i'm sure people do that with cds and dvds etc these days, perhaps not that many as a big pirate would just download before release day without bothering about paying for anything, so not a huge piracy issue
Posted by Saracen - Fri 11 Jan 2013 12:20
Part of the problem with a UK version of this will be the differences in UK and US copyright law, because the provisions over personal and domestic copies are different.

So, to provide this sort of a service, Amazon are either having to utilise differences in those laws, or negotiate licence specific agreements with the rights holders for all CD's covered, which I assume is why it only applies to specific CD's.

There are regular discussions about UK law and personal format-shifted copies of material you own, and provisions on that in the UK and US are certainly differently implemented.

In short, while we might end up getting the same service, I'm not holding my breath.

Also, of course, while it's a good idea, all it really means is that Amazon are doing something for the buyer that, until now, the buyer has been doing for him/herself, whether doing it is legal or not.

One question I have would be about the quality of the MP3 provided, because as anyone that's every done any audio work, even something as simple as ripping an MP3, it's nowhere near as simple as a black-box process where you just feed audio source in one end and identical MP3's come out the other end. In reality, the quality of the MP3 varies dramatically according to the settings, and even the algorithms in whatever converter you use. So are Amazon going to be going for ultimate fidelity, or cheap, cheerful, quick and small?

Frankly, I'd rather just see a simple and long-promised change to copyright law so I can produce my own MP3's, to my own needs. And, by the way, what if I want the MP3 but want to buy the CD somewhere other than Amazon? Changes to copyright law would do that, but retailers other than Amazon may well not have the market clout to negotiate the rights deals that Amazon appear to havd done.
Posted by krazy_olie - Fri 11 Jan 2013 13:02
So you could have sold you entire CD collection but amazon has no idea and will still give you an mp3 copy… hmm. I can't imagine UK law being this loose.
Although you could flip it on it's head and say you buy the cd and the right to a digital copy. When you've sold it you've only given them the CD.

What about gifts? If I buy a cd as a present I get their digital copy?
It's all a bit messy isn't it.

The 2nd hand issue is one of the potential arguments for keeping it illegal to rip. I'm of the opinion that if you sell a CD you should delete any ripped files, but there is no way to enforce that.
Posted by Saracen - Fri 11 Jan 2013 17:59
krazy_olie
So you could have sold you entire CD collection but amazon has no idea and will still give you an mp3 copy… hmm. I can't imagine UK law being this loose.
Although you could flip it on it's head and say you buy the cd and the right to a digital copy. When you've sold it you've only given them the CD.

What about gifts? If I buy a cd as a present I get their digital copy?
It's all a bit messy isn't it.

The 2nd hand issue is one of the potential arguments for keeping it illegal to rip. I'm of the opinion that if you sell a CD you should delete any ripped files, but there is no way to enforce that.
All true enough, but on the enforcement issue, nothing much has changed since the introduction of compact cassette recorders in, what, late 60's, and VCR's a decade or so later …. which is to say, it might be illegal to make home copies, but it's all but unenforceable because you the rights owners don't know when it's been done, can almost never prove it, and even if they do know and could prove it, for one-off personal copies, tne legal remedies are extremely limited. This is, of course, a very different situation from the much more recent phenomenon of not just making a copy of your disk for your own use, but of uploading it to the net. Then, the potential penalties can be FAR. more dramatic.

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