Last Friday I deleted my Amazon Music app off of my iPhone because when I opened it all my music was available only via shuffle. I have very modest music needs, and I only use the app about once/week at the most. I listened to an eclectic collection of old rock and classical music. I’d listen to thirty minutes of music, maybe an hour at the most in one sitting, then turned it off and went off to do other tasks.
But apparently Amazon management decided that they weren’t making enough money and so made the “free” tier of music, which is available only through Amazon Prime, which I pay for and have since it was first introduced in 2005, as onerous as possible to “incentivize” Amazon Prime members to spend even more for a decent Amazon Music experience. I’m not paying yet another monthly fee for music. I have hundreds of CDs which I’ve mostly ripped and I’ll starting playing those back through my home-built Linux-based media server. And going forward I’m going to start looking in thrift stores for old CDs to add to my collection.
I’m not the only one who feels this way. Here’s an article that goes into even more depth over what is happening, why it’s happening (from Amazon’s perspective), and the fallout.
Radarwitch
Maybe CDs, DVDs, and local streaming are also much more energy-efficient compared to all these servers in the clouds… this is at least my brother’s argument, who doesn’t stop collecting real hardware media…
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The counter argument to that is how much energy and raw materials it takes to manufacture a CD or DVD. And that doesn’t include all the old vinyl records made over the prior decades.
I’m not doing this to minimize my resource footprint but to throw a very tiny wrench into the Amazon money machine. I don’t feel righteous, just angry as hell.
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