I’m a fan of Amazon, always have been, though my relationship with the brand has, ironically, never been particularly personal. I don’t feel emotional about Amazon, I feel – transactional. This despite the fact that I have probably spent more on the site than the combined college savings accounts for my three kids (Hi Kids!).
This changed today when I got this email:
Holy. Crap. I just got given all those CDs I bought from Amazon, in a format I can use, for free. 1706 songs, to be exact, many of which I probably had forgotten about.
Now THAT is surprise and delight.This is how you leverage your past relationship with your customers to foster massive loyalty.
I read about this move, of course (it’s called AutoRip), and thought “Wow, that’s cool,” but then forgot about it.
This is the *exact opposite* of what I’ve come to expect from the music industry. With those chuckleheads, every time you change formats, you have to buy the music all over again. I have no idea how Amazon got them to play along with this, but I am sure as hell glad they did.
Now, I probably have most of this music already ripped to my iTunes, but I plan to download the whole lot of it anyway, because it’ll be way cleaner, with metadata and the like. So. Cool.
(Oh, but no, I don’t plan on using the Amazon Cloud Player. Yet. But I know that’s where you’re going with all this…)