In 1999, with Britney Spears astride the top of the music charts, Amazon.co.uk started selling music to the UK public. Its rather primitive website encouraged people to fill their distinctive cardboard boxes with CDs, cassettes and records, and so began an online shopping revolution that now sells almost every conceivable object and sometimes even delivers it on the same day. Those albums bought in 1999, however, are now likely to be trapped on a format that a user may not even have the facilities to play. While vinyl retains its enthusiasts, the cassette is almost totally redundant and although CDs still make up more than two thirds of all album sales, their decline is also hastening. This week, however, Amazon gave Britney Spears back to her fans: if you bought one of 350,000 titles any time since 1999 via Amazon, the site has uploaded them into your online “music locker”. Just sign in to recall your past passions. Music you have probably already forgotten buying can be rediscovered for better or worse. The so-called “AutoRip” service is Amazon’s attempt to encourage more people to think of it rather than Apple’s iTunes as the home of digital music, but it also addresses users’ reasonable frustration that having bought an album perhaps on record, cassette and CD, the digital version meant either a laborious process of putting each CD into a computer, or simply buying it again online. Launching in January in the US, and earlier this month across other European countries, AutoRip has been challenged by some for not covering all music and – perhaps more reasonably – for being a service that was delayed by the record labels’ fear of digital music.
