I went on Amazon today looking for some new music and I found the All-American Rejects new album was out. So I listened to the preview and decided, well, I haven’t tried Amazon’s MP3 Download store yet so why not.. I’m not sure I want to buy a physical copy of this album because I have their last one and I’m not listening to it a whole lot.

I see that I will have to download Amazon MP3 Downloader to purchase the album. Well, I guess it can’t hurt..  The album is just $2.99 this way so whatever. I click to buy, log in, and I see this:

(Amazon MP3 Purchases are limited to U.S. customers.)

There we go. Great. Always these US-only and other regional rights boundaries. And it doesn’t end there. Even if I would have been a US citizen and able to buy the album, I would only be able to download it ONCE! Lose it, in a hard drive crash or forgetting to migrate it when switching computers, and you’re screwed. Even though you paid for it.

So basically I’m thinking… What the **** is my incentive here not to just go on a torrent website and download it? It takes out 99 % of the hassle of legally buying it and I can get it again should I happen to lose it.

Oh yea, and I wanted to get my Canadian friend an invite to try Spotify beta. A great piece of music software in my book. But that didn’t work out either because of the issues, again, with rights.

Tags: All-American Rejects, Amazon, Amazon MP3 Downloader, digital rights, MP3 downloads, music, The Recording Industry

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 18th, 2008 at 9:09 pm and is filed under business, music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.