One terrible thing about buying my music from Amazon, both for Amazon and me, is that it is just too cheap. Amazon routinely puts great albums on rotating sales for $2.99, certain albums for 99¢ and hit songs for 25¢. In the last two weeks I’ve bought:
- Fleetwood Mac’s greatest hits – $3
- Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream “The Complete Confection” edition – $1
- Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die – $1
- Bruno Mars’ Doo-Wops & Hooligans – $1
- The National’s Boxer – $4
- Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe – 25¢
- Flo Rida ft Sia’s Wild Ones – 25¢
- Fun. ft Janelle Monae’s We Are Young – 25¢
- User ft will.iam’s OMG – 25¢
- Matisyahu – Sunshine – 25¢ (never heard this song before)
That’s a great deal of music I like for a bit over $11. The problem for me is that it’s so easy and cheap to buy. I’ll just end up buying lots of stuff I don’t really need (like most of the albums up there) and have too much music to get through.
The problem for Amazon is that their customers (i.e., me) will expect music to be that cheap – $1 for albums, and 25¢ for top 40 hits. Are they making money at these prices or are they loss leaders? Well the ease of buying these songs has made me buy a couple of songs for full price from Amazon. Unfortunately for them, I’ve taken advantage of a $3 Amazon Local credit, and a $2 festival credit to make my purchases. So they aren’t making any money off of me!
P.S., One song I downloaded had a fair (but not great) encoding so I complained to them. They said they would refund the song to me, which is great, except they ended up refunding the entire purchase (only $2+). But that’s even less real money I’ll spend at their store!
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