The really interesting thing is that this indicates that Amazon really is copying the bits around to everyone's locker, rather than just saying "user x has rights to song y". Otherwise why would it take so long (12 hours+) just to give me access to these songs?
What is the reasoning behind not performing de-duplication of common files? It seems incredibly stupid to copy a popular song hundreds of thousands of times when a "single" canonical copy would do. Multiple people can stream music from a single file and people with large music collections would wait seconds instead of hours waiting for their songs to upload.
I'm curious if they really are doing that. It could lend some weight to their claims they don't need the music industries permission to launch a music service as they aren't streaming things, the users are accessing their own files.
I think they are. I bought the album and at first my locker had only a few of the songs marked as playable, a few minutes later, more were playable, and after maybe 5 minutes they were all playable. To me, the best explanation for this behavior was that it was taking some time for Amazon to copy all my purchased songs over to my locker.
ps: I'm not a big Lady Gaga fan, but for 99 cents I figured I'd give it a whirl.
...and is the assumption that the Amazon music service uses AWS or something like it, and the speed of EBS or something like it is too slow at this scale for the songs to be instantly playable?
Amazon tags the mp3 you bought from us with your customer ID. I suppose this is why each customer gets a very slightly different file in this case too.
If it would be only a tag, the web server could be modified to deliver most of the song from the same file (at least I'd do that). However if they do "watermarking" in audio data, there's no escape for them, every purchase is really demanding on CPU's.
This articles serves to point out something more significant, which is how broken Amazon's review system is:
> However, the damage has already been done, as users are meting out one-star ratings in droves, most of which deal with Amazon’s slow service as opposed to the quality of the music (although some reviews in the lower bracket did dub the disc “disappointing”). As a result, the album has a relatively low three-star rating.
Can't Amazon allocate some resources to find a decent fix to this? It doesn't exactly make it desirable to use their platform.
It depends on whether you consider delivery and packaging to be part of the product that Amazon is selling. If you buy something physical twice and it comes broken both times because Amazon is packing it poorly (which has happened to me), is that relevant for a review?
No. If you're reviewing Fry's electronics and they sell you a previously-opened, broken HP computer, it's the review of Fry's that should suffer, not the review of that particular HP machine.
A review of an album should be confined to your opinions on that album.
That being said, most people don't know the difference as I see this kind of thing on Zappos and NewEgg all the time.
I think people do know the difference but reviews offer them a very public way to complain.
I don’t think there are easily discoverable and public review sections for the services Amazon and other online retailers provide†. Are there gaps in the selection of products? Are prices appropriate? Is the shipping slow? Is the packaging inappropriate? Are you given inaccurate information about the arrival of you orders? Are songs slow to download? Is the user interface wonky?
There is no place for consumers to publicly review online retailers on their own websites. That sucks. It makes product reviews less useful because they are riddled with all that noise that is in no way related to the actual product. It also doesn’t allow consumers to review online retailers in a way that’s accessible to other consumers. This is a failing of the online retailer, not consumers.
I think online retailers are quite happy that all the talk about their services is spread around in all the product reviews and not in any central place. They can even delete criticism of their service with the justification that the review in question is off-topic.
It’s not even as though this is a hard problem. You would just have to ask the reviewer what he wants to write about (the product or the service).
†Amazon’s review guidelines (http://www.amazon.com/gp/community-help/customer-reviews-gui...), for example, do not even allow users to publicly share information about or criticize Amazon’s service in reviews. You are asked to use the feedback form which is not public. Quote: “What’s not allowed: […] Feedback on the seller, your shipment experience or the packaging (you can do that at www.amazon.com/feedback and www.amazon.com/packaging)”
Amazon actually has a system for rating packaging separately from products (at least for non-digital goods), so it looks they are way ahead of you on that one.
This is also a problem when looking at books on the Kindle. Many books are good, but their reviews are destroyed by a terrible Kindle conversion. See the version of Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks, for example: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Surface-Detail/dp/B00462RVHI/ref=sr_...
I agree, but in the case of bad Kindle conversions, the only thing Amazon can fairly be faulted for is requiring users to accompany their reviews with ratings. It's up to the publisher to perform the conversion.
Whenever I have a complaint about a Kindle conversion (twice in two years), I try to rate the book based on the author's work -- the text itself -- but make the review title something like "Do not buy for Kindle", but I can see why reviewers might choose to do otherwise: it is, after all, the publisher's product and the publisher's fault for producing a sloppy "printing".
> I tried this as an experiment to see if I wanted to order more music this way, but it only downloaded half the songs. Still a deal at 99cents, but not an experiment I’ll want to repeat with a full-price album.
This is "expanding the userbase", and seems overwhelmingly successful.
I've been thinking recently that "sales" (as in specials, temporary price reductions) are a socially acceptable way to do discriminatory pricing (different prices for different people).
You want to do this because some people are happy to pay more (so you want to charge the higher price), and some people will only buy at a lower price. If you price it high, you lose the low people; if you price it low, you can't charge the high people a high price. It makes sense to therefore have offer high prices to high people, and low prices to low people. But people hate this! Amazon actually tried it for a while, until it was noticed (maybe they still do, but in a less discernible way?)
A sale is a way to capture those low people, and only losing some high people. This is apart from getting them to be regular users.
The model of having regular sales to capture people who wouldn't otherwise buy, on a product that is digital so costs nothing to create (ie all costs are already sunk), is done really successfully with video games by Steam. People actually complain when there's a good Steam sale because they end up spending so much money, $5 or $10 at a time.
I agree with your analysis that sale = acceptable price discrimination, but I think there's more to it when they do a sale on release day. That's when most of the people willing to pay full price buy it!
I think it's largely to get people to buy from them instead of iTunes and thus to try CloudDrive and their mp3 service. And also to price discriminate and get people who would have otherwise not bought to buy from them and try CloudDrive and their mp3 service.
Not entirely so. I keep latency monitors running on Amazon.com and all of the sites I have hosted on EC2, and noticed a distinct spike in latency across the board corresponding with yesterday's offer.
People are way too harsh on Amazon. I mean who could have predicted that so many people would buy a 1 dollar album from arguably the most popular/controversial artist on the entire planet.
This is so irritating. Why do people expect new products to be infinitely scalable out of the gates. Of course they're going to show slowdown during a flash event. Because of people like this, great projects like Google Wave get shut down, and all because of people's irrational expectations. "It doesn't do everything... I'm never using this again." Startup projects grow slowly and organically. Just because it's coming from a big company, why do people expect it to be totally different.
Looks like they weren't really ready for this. However download times appear to be improving.
If you're stuck, trying pausing and restarting the download.
I just bought it from my iPad, ( had to gift it to myself to get it to go through). I got it for free. It came up as a .99 album and a $.99 discount/promotion. I have no idea what happened unless they are making it free to make up for the technical issues.
Also, I don't know if I get the 20gb for first album purchase (probably not but I can deal with that) or if it will end up in my cloud locker when I accept the 'gift'.
Seemed to be challenging to find the offer on Amazon. Here is the direct link http://tinyurl.com/3lkrosr Worked fine for me. 1-click purchase + download from cloud.
Oh, there must be something else wrong... It cant be only the load. I mean, they can just spin up more EC2 instances right? Isn't every application infinitely scaleable in "the cloud"? (tongue in cheek)
