Amazon Digital Music Hell

Posted: Friday, April 12, 2024 at 06:19 AM | Categories: Miscellaneous

Amazon sent me an email this morning letting me know that a digital album I purchased was available for download. You'd think I'd be able to click a link and download my purchase, but you'd be wrong.

Take a look at the email. The first link is supposed to be a link to download the music from my library.

When I click on the link, I get the following page:

Well that's not good. Let me see if I click the order details link:

OK, that works. So when I click the Launch Music Library button it's going to take me to the downloads for my most recent purchase, right?

Oops, nope. The first thing I see is a pitch to pay more to gain access to millions of songs. I'be been buying digital music from Amazon for years and they prompt me like this EVERY SINGLE TIME I open the app. You'd think that after likely hundreds of No's they'd realize I'm not going to sign up and stop asking me. Nope, the product manager for this obviously isn't paying attention to the telemetry from this feature.

After I dismiss the sales pitch I've seen a hundred times or more, the app opens and shows me some of the bands I've purchased in the past, but then a bunch of artists I know nothing about. I'm into the blues and southern rock (among others) how did I get a station listing musicians I've never heard of. That list should all be progressive rock, blues, folk, rock, heavy metal. Such a horrible experience.

Alright, so I'm here to download my latest purchase. Where do I do that? I clicked on Library to bring up my, you know, library and this is what I see.

Alright, I think I'm almost there. I clicked on Purchased and FINALLY the album I purchased shows up.

A few questions:

1. Why did this have to be so freaking hard?
2. Why if I just purchased the latest album from Mark Knopfler do they recommend artists in, from what I can tell, a completely different genre? Amazon has telemetry that tells them what type of music I listen to, why not use that data to craft a list that would interest me instead of assuming I'm a twenty-something dude listening to I don't even know what type of music that was they recommended.
3. Why can't the download link from the email and the order details page take me to the download?
4. Why did I have to click 18 times to download 9 music files? Where's the freaking Download Album?
5. Why doesn't someone setup a test process that validates download emails added to emails. I've done this 20 times or more, the links never work but Amazon doesn't seem to know or care.

Now, one of the things I tried to resolve this was go to my orders page and there was a button labeled Download Music that should be able to help me, right? When I clicked on the button, the actual button that should allow me to download the entire album as a single file. What did I get? See below.

My point here is the whole Amazon music thing is seriously broken and since Amazon doesn't provide a forum where I can let them know, I'm writing about it here.

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