Want to buy physical media and still have a digital copy? Amazon feels your pain – having introduced their AutoRip service earlier this year to give free digital copies of songs and albums to anyone who buys a CD from them. Now they’re expanding AutoRip to vinyl purchases – making it a massive win for vinyl DJs who want to continue buying their favorite tracks on turntable-friendly media. When you purchase albums that are enabled for the service, the digital tracks show up in your Amazon Cloud Player personal music storage account.
The one caveat, unfortunately, is quality. The service is only providing the digital tracks in 256kbps MP3s – so 320s and lossless files remain out of reach for now. Additionally, AutoRip is only for US customers at the moment – licensing for other countries could become more complicated.
Good Guy Amazon is also grandfathering in all vinyl (and CD) purchases all the way back to 1998 on their site.
It’d be really awesome if we saw this practice start up in other stores – both online and physical record stores could do it!
Learn more by reading Amazon’s complete press release or by checking out Amazon AutoRip
