Free music

Amazon had a promo code this week for three dollars credit towards downloadable MP3 music. No purchase was necessary and the balance was good for one week. I jumped at the chance to get a few songs for free since most of them are around one dollar each. While searching through the collection for something we didn’t have, but wanted, I discovered they had other MP3 songs available for free separate from the offer.

There were freely downloadable MP3 songs for the taking in practically every genre (probably promotional efforts by the artists/publishers). I concentrated on House, Jazz, Blues, Pop and Christian music. I listened to a couple hundred samples of “free” songs and downloaded maybe 20 of them to listen to in full later. Since Amazon only lets you listen to about 15-30 seconds of each song I’m not sure about the ones I downloaded yet. Since I didn’t spend any money on them though, I can just delete them if I’m not impressed. I won’t be out any money and I got to hear some new music. I think this is a cool idea and I’ll have to check back at Amazon in the future for other free music downloads.

I think the industry could be making use of the digital medium so much better than they are currently. They’re all so scared of lost sales that they are missing the bigger picture. If they considered it a marketing medium and leveraged their libraries in that capacity they could expose consumers to new/different artists. In turn, that would help producers sell a lot more songs at one dollar each –making them some serious money. They could also make money on older music by making it available through this medium. Maybe as the aging executives retire the music industry will catch up with consumers somewhat.