That’s right - if you want to buy MP3s on Amazon in 2022, you have to purchase each song or album individually. If you don’t click Buy there and then, it’s gone. If you click one of these, you’ll be taken to a page that looks like the Amazon basket, but it’s not.
This takes you to another page plastered with Amazon Music stream buttons, but at least this time there are prices next to each song that you can use to purchase them. To buy a track, you have to find a what is basically a hidden menu item under Purchase Options > MP3 Music.
But instead of treating songs like normal items for purchase, Amazon now redirects you to an Amazon Music page that really wants you to stream them instead. Your first steps are to open the homepage, search for a song, and click it - so far, so good. My first stop was Amazon, because that was where I bought my digital music in the early 2010s, but I was shocked to find just how badly the customer experience had deteriorated since my last visit. That’s not too bad when you consider that as far back as the early 2000s you’d buy a CD album for £10 with an average of ten songs or so. Having relied too much on Spotify for years, I wasn’t up to speed with MP3 pricing and was expecting to get ripped off, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that most songs are a reasonable 99p, with a few slightly below that.
Yes, nearly every song in existence is available for free on Spotify, but what would I do if that service ever ceased to exist, or got locked behind a paywall? It makes sense to keep a trickle of your favourite songs coming in to your offline library so you can own the music, keep it, and listen to it on the Tube without paying. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want to buy some MP3s. How could it possibly get any worse, gamers ask? Well friends, I tried buying some music last week and I’ve seen how bad things could become. With the announcement of each new game, from even the most acclaimed studios, a question lingers - have the developers followed the trend and stuffed it full of microtransactions? And all too often the answer is yes. Many video game fans mourn what has happened to their hobby in recent years.
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