Well, that was weird. But nice.
You may have heard that Amazon are selling non-DRM MP3 downloads. I shit you not. Anyway, I decided to check it out. I’ve been thinking about buying Amy Winehouse’s album, but it was £12 at HMV (sod that) and it’s not in iTunes Plus on the iTMS, which means a lousy 128kbps file. But lo, at Amazon it’s a 256kbps, non-DRM MP3! And the whole album is like $9! Or £4.50 for those of you not up to speed with the dollar’s decline.
So I decide to download it. First up, to get a whole album you need to download a little file downloader thingy. First hurdle, right? No Mac version? Wrong! They even detect the OS and offer the Mac version right off. Cool.
Takes a bit of effort to get the browser to recognise that I have the software installed and to stop offering it to me: in the end I click the “browse music store” button in the app itself, which seems to work. Alrighty!
Now I should mention that nowhere on the site does it say anything about US-only. And they know I have a UK billing address: I’ve had an account with Amazon.com for years. So I click on the “Buy” button, and I get asked which of my many credit cards I want to use. I click one, hit next, and…
And I get a screen saying “Please enter a new billing address”. WTF? And as I type it in, I see there’s no “Country” selector, just “State” and “Zip”. Hmmm….
So I try leaving them blank. No dice. Wants both state and zip. I try a random state, and a random number for the zip. “Zip does not match state. Zip format invalid.”
At this stage I’m about to give up. Obviously they’re going to check the address against the card, so why bother? But for some reason, perhaps because I’m a bit stubborn, I persevere. I google “NY zip” and get a list of New York zip codes. I select NY and enter the first code.
Bingo! Download proceeds! The address obviously has nothing to do with the credit card! Presumably it just goes to the record company, who probably have some stupid rule about US residents only. Amazon know I’m not US-resident, but they don’t really care. If I just brazenly walk past their for-show security, no worries. Compare with iTMS: if you don’t have a US address for your credit card, you cannot buy from the US store, end of story. (In fact Apple are a bit over-zealous: the credit card I use for UK iTMS expired recently, and Apple wouldn’t let me use an Amex card, which is a perfectly normal card with a UK billing address. I couldn’t even get to the address page: as soon as I typed in the number, Apple rejected it as a non-UK card!)
And the little downloader thingy puts the music straight into iTunes. Album artwork, the works. So it’s not quite as easy as iTunes, but it’s close. I’m pretty impressed.
September 26th, 2007 at 11:51 am
[...] And it seems pretty good: I’ve been thinking about buying Amy Winehouse’s album, but it was £12 at HMV (sod that) and it’s not in iTunes Plus on the iTMS, which means a lousy 128kbps file. But lo, at Amazon it’s a 256kbps, non-DRM MP3! And the whole album is like $9! [...]