Amazon AutoRip service gives out free digital copies of CDs

[Don]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20972027

Online retailer Amazon has launched a service that stores free digital versions of CDs bought via its store.

Amazon AutoRip will automatically keep a digital copy of eligible CDs in a customer's cloud storage account.

Customers will be able to get at the music via Amazon's Cloud Player on the web or through tablet and smartphone apps.

Amazon has drawn up a catalogue of 50,000 CDs that are eligible for AutoRip

The catalogue has been compiled from those albums that have proved most popular with Amazon customers in the last 15 years.

The list includes "Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd, "Thriller" by Michael Jackson and "21" by Adele.

Any customer who has bought a CD in the catalogue from Amazon since the firm started trading in 1998 will be eligible to get a free MP3 copy of it. Amazon said it anticipated creating copies of millions of CDs.

"When we picked those 50,000 titles we focused on having a substantial majority of our physical CD sales covered," said Steve Boom, head of digital music at Amazon in a statement.

The service potentially makes it much easier for people to build up a library of digital music. Before now most CD owners had to rip the songs themselves to create digital versions.

The Amazon Cloud Player can be accessed a web browser, as well as on Android phones, iPhones, Kindle Fire tablets and other devices.

The move is widely seen as an attempt to take market share from arch-rival Apple's iTunes music store.

The Cupertino giant has similar cloud storage services for music and leads the market with more than 50% of the market share, while Amazon has less than 15%. Google offers a similar service.

[JRNYMAN]

Back in the late 90's there was a site called CDNow.com which was purchased by Amazon and became their music/audio portion of the conglomeration. (If you type CDNow.com into your browser's address box, it still redirects to Amazon.) Anyway, CDNow did that very thing but they took it one step further - you could store your entire library on their servers regardless of where you obtained the CD. All you had to do was insert a CD into your drive, the site's software would read and verify what you had and that it was a legit copy and BAM! that album was instantly added to your online library. No uploading, no file transfer, nothing. When Amazon acquired CDNow.com, all that went away for some reason. Surprising it's taken them this long to institute this feature.

Amazon's acquisition of CDNow story:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDNow