4 ms·

Lady Gaga's $0.99 Album Download Overwhelms Amazon

76 points by scottkduncan 15y ago

tzs 15y ago
Lady Gaga does what Anonymous could not?
- jamesbkel 15y ago
  Well, she had a lot of help from the N fans who purchased the album.
  - ktsmith 15y ago
    There were also a lot of people buying to get their music locker expanded to 5GB for one year.
  - sliverstorm 15y ago
    It is kind of comforting to know that Anon is still smaller than the fanbase of a pop icon.
mikiem 15y ago
Oh, there must be something else wrong... It cant be only the load. I mean, they can just spin up more EC2 instances right? Isn't every application infinitely scaleable in "the cloud"? (tongue in cheek)
aresant 15y ago
More accurate title would be "Overwhelms Amazon's Music Download Service" EG - no instances of downtime for the regular site / commerce.
- nlo 15y ago
  Not entirely so. I keep latency monitors running on Amazon.com and all of the sites I have hosted on EC2, and noticed a distinct spike in latency across the board corresponding with yesterday's offer.
kmfrk 15y ago
This articles serves to point out something more significant, which is how broken Amazon's review system is: > However, the damage has already been done, as users are meting out one-star ratings in droves, most of which deal with Amazon’s slow service as opposed to the quality of the music (although some reviews in the lower bracket did dub the disc “disappointing”). As a result, the album has a relatively low three-star rating. Can't Amazon allocate some resources to find a decent fix to this? It doesn't exactly make it desirable to use their platform.
- smackfu 15y ago
  It depends on whether you consider delivery and packaging to be part of the product that Amazon is selling. If you buy something physical twice and it comes broken both times because Amazon is packing it poorly (which has happened to me), is that relevant for a review?
  - bgentry 15y ago
    No. If you're reviewing Fry's electronics and they sell you a previously-opened, broken HP computer, it's the review of Fry's that should suffer, not the review of that particular HP machine. A review of an album should be confined to your opinions on that album. That being said, most people don't know the difference as I see this kind of thing on Zappos and NewEgg all the time.
    - ugh 15y ago
      I think people do know the difference but reviews offer them a very public way to complain. I don’t think there are easily discoverable and public review sections for the services Amazon and other online retailers provide†. Are there gaps in the selection of products? Are prices appropriate? Is the shipping slow? Is the packaging inappropriate? Are you given inaccurate information about the arrival of you orders? Are songs slow to download? Is the user interface wonky? There is no place for consumers to publicly review online retailers on their own websites. That sucks. It makes product reviews less useful because they are riddled with all that noise that is in no way related to the actual product. It also doesn’t allow consumers to review online retailers in a way that’s accessible to other consumers. This is a failing of the online retailer, not consumers. I think online retailers are quite happy that all the talk about their services is spread around in all the product reviews and not in any central place. They can even delete criticism of their service with the justification that the review in question is off-topic. It’s not even as though this is a hard problem. You would just have to ask the reviewer what he wants to write about (the product or the service). †Amazon’s review guidelines (http://www.amazon.com/gp/community-help/customer-reviews-guidelines http://www.amazon.com/gp/community-help/customer-reviews-gui...), for example, do not even allow users to publicly share information about or criticize Amazon’s service in reviews. You are asked to use the feedback form which is not public. Quote: “What’s not allowed: […] Feedback on the seller, your shipment experience or the packaging (you can do that at www.amazon.com/feedback and www.amazon.com/packaging)”
smackfu 15y ago
The really interesting thing is that this indicates that Amazon really is copying the bits around to everyone's locker, rather than just saying "user x has rights to song y". Otherwise why would it take so long (12 hours+) just to give me access to these songs?
- ktsmith 15y ago
  I'm curious if they really are doing that. It could lend some weight to their claims they don't need the music industries permission to launch a music service as they aren't streaming things, the users are accessing their own files.
  - whyenot 15y ago
    I think they are. I bought the album and at first my locker had only a few of the songs marked as playable, a few minutes later, more were playable, and after maybe 5 minutes they were all playable. To me, the best explanation for this behavior was that it was taking some time for Amazon to copy all my purchased songs over to my locker. ps: I'm not a big Lady Gaga fan, but for 99 cents I figured I'd give it a whirl.
    - mikiem 15y ago
      ...and is the assumption that the Amazon music service uses AWS or something like it, and the speed of EBS or something like it is too slow at this scale for the songs to be instantly playable?
      - dustingetz 15y ago
        amazon cloud player is fast enough to stream songs to my 3G droid without skipping.
- rudiger 15y ago
  What is the reasoning behind not performing de-duplication of common files? It seems incredibly stupid to copy a popular song hundreds of thousands of times when a "single" canonical copy would do. Multiple people can stream music from a single file and people with large music collections would wait seconds instead of hours waiting for their songs to upload.
6ren 15y ago
> I tried this as an experiment to see if I wanted to order more music this way, but it only downloaded half the songs. Still a deal at 99cents, but not an experiment I’ll want to repeat with a full-price album. This is "expanding the userbase", and seems overwhelmingly successful. I've been thinking recently that "sales" (as in specials, temporary price reductions) are a socially acceptable way to do discriminatory pricing (different prices for different people). You want to do this because some people are happy to pay more (so you want to charge the higher price), and some people will only buy at a lower price. If you price it high, you lose the low people; if you price it low, you can't charge the high people a high price. It makes sense to therefore have offer high prices to high people, and low prices to low people. But people hate this! Amazon actually tried it for a while, until it was noticed (maybe they still do, but in a less discernible way?) A sale is a way to capture those low people, and only losing some high people. This is apart from getting them to be regular users.
- jackowayed 15y ago
  I agree with your analysis that sale = acceptable price discrimination, but I think there's more to it when they do a sale on release day. That's when most of the people willing to pay full price buy it! I think it's largely to get people to buy from them instead of iTunes and thus to try CloudDrive and their mp3 service. And also to price discriminate and get people who would have otherwise not bought to buy from them and try CloudDrive and their mp3 service.
- busted 15y ago
  The model of having regular sales to capture people who wouldn't otherwise buy, on a product that is digital so costs nothing to create (ie all costs are already sunk), is done really successfully with video games by Steam. People actually complain when there's a good Steam sale because they end up spending so much money, $5 or $10 at a time.
dr_ 15y ago
Looks like they weren't really ready for this. However download times appear to be improving. If you're stuck, trying pausing and restarting the download.
- warmfuzzykitten 15y ago
  It was quite speedy for me just now. No complaints.
- smackfu 15y ago
  Mine isn't even hung up in downloading; I don't even have the songs in my Cloud music thing. Half of them are just pending somehow.
warmfuzzykitten 15y ago
Seemed to be challenging to find the offer on Amazon. Here is the direct link http://tinyurl.com/3lkrosr http://tinyurl.com/3lkrosr Worked fine for me. 1-click purchase + download from cloud.
- smackfu 15y ago
  This would be a pretty good way to sneak in an affiliate link. Personally, I found it in a big banner ad on amazon.com/mp3
- aw3c2 15y ago
  Non-shortened actual direct link is http://www.amazon.com/Born-This-Way-digital-booklet/dp/B0051QIGP4/ http://www.amazon.com/Born-This-Way-digital-booklet/dp/B0051... Also without lots of parameters that might or might not include an affiliate strings. Please do not post shortened URLs here. It is obfuscation.
  - pbhjpbhj 15y ago
    That link takes me to the album priced at $6.99 - did I miss the deal? -- Edit: Oh, also "It appears that you are attempting to use Amazon Cloud Player from outside the U.S. This service is intended for U.S. customers only." Globalisation it's the future!
    - turtle4 15y ago
      Yes, you missed the deal, but because it was available only on release day (5/23) at the discounted price, not because of your location.
jonnytran 15y ago
This is so irritating. Why do people expect new products to be infinitely scalable out of the gates. Of course they're going to show slowdown during a flash event. Because of people like this, great projects like Google Wave get shut down, and all because of people's irrational expectations. "It doesn't do everything... I'm never using this again." Startup projects grow slowly and organically. Just because it's coming from a big company, why do people expect it to be totally different.
kgermino 15y ago
I just bought it from my iPad, ( had to gift it to myself to get it to go through). I got it for free. It came up as a .99 album and a $.99 discount/promotion. I have no idea what happened unless they are making it free to make up for the technical issues. Also, I don't know if I get the 20gb for first album purchase (probably not but I can deal with that) or if it will end up in my cloud locker when I accept the 'gift'.
- RyanKearney 15y ago
  Was it your first purchase? My first Album purchase had a $2.99 promotion discount or something.
BasDirks 15y ago
People are way too harsh on Amazon. I mean who could have predicted that so many people would buy a 1 dollar album from arguably the most popular/controversial artist on the entire planet.

76 points by scottkduncan 15y ago

tzs 15y ago

Lady Gaga does what Anonymous could not?

jamesbkel 15y ago
Well, she had a lot of help from the N fans who purchased the album.
- ktsmith 15y ago
  There were also a lot of people buying to get their music locker expanded to 5GB for one year.
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  It is kind of comforting to know that Anon is still smaller than the fanbase of a pop icon.

mikiem 15y ago

Oh, there must be something else wrong... It cant be only the load. I mean, they can just spin up more EC2 instances right? Isn't every application infinitely scaleable in "the cloud"? (tongue in cheek)

aresant 15y ago

More accurate title would be "Overwhelms Amazon's Music Download Service" EG - no instances of downtime for the regular site / commerce.

nlo 15y ago
Not entirely so. I keep latency monitors running on Amazon.com and all of the sites I have hosted on EC2, and noticed a distinct spike in latency across the board corresponding with yesterday's offer.

kmfrk 15y ago

This articles serves to point out something more significant, which is how broken Amazon's review system is: > However, the damage has already been done, as users are meting out one-star ratings in droves, most of which deal with Amazon’s slow service as opposed to the quality of the music (although some reviews in the lower bracket did dub the disc “disappointing”). As a result, the album has a relatively low three-star rating. Can't Amazon allocate some resources to find a decent fix to this? It doesn't exactly make it desirable to use their platform.

smackfu 15y ago
It depends on whether you consider delivery and packaging to be part of the product that Amazon is selling. If you buy something physical twice and it comes broken both times because Amazon is packing it poorly (which has happened to me), is that relevant for a review?
- bgentry 15y ago
  No. If you're reviewing Fry's electronics and they sell you a previously-opened, broken HP computer, it's the review of Fry's that should suffer, not the review of that particular HP machine. A review of an album should be confined to your opinions on that album. That being said, most people don't know the difference as I see this kind of thing on Zappos and NewEgg all the time.
  - ugh 15y ago
    I think people do know the difference but reviews offer them a very public way to complain. I don’t think there are easily discoverable and public review sections for the services Amazon and other online retailers provide†. Are there gaps in the selection of products? Are prices appropriate? Is the shipping slow? Is the packaging inappropriate? Are you given inaccurate information about the arrival of you orders? Are songs slow to download? Is the user interface wonky? There is no place for consumers to publicly review online retailers on their own websites. That sucks. It makes product reviews less useful because they are riddled with all that noise that is in no way related to the actual product. It also doesn’t allow consumers to review online retailers in a way that’s accessible to other consumers. This is a failing of the online retailer, not consumers. I think online retailers are quite happy that all the talk about their services is spread around in all the product reviews and not in any central place. They can even delete criticism of their service with the justification that the review in question is off-topic. It’s not even as though this is a hard problem. You would just have to ask the reviewer what he wants to write about (the product or the service). †Amazon’s review guidelines (http://www.amazon.com/gp/community-help/customer-reviews-guidelines http://www.amazon.com/gp/community-help/customer-reviews-gui...), for example, do not even allow users to publicly share information about or criticize Amazon’s service in reviews. You are asked to use the feedback form which is not public. Quote: “What’s not allowed: […] Feedback on the seller, your shipment experience or the packaging (you can do that at www.amazon.com/feedback and www.amazon.com/packaging)”

smackfu 15y ago

The really interesting thing is that this indicates that Amazon really is copying the bits around to everyone's locker, rather than just saying "user x has rights to song y". Otherwise why would it take so long (12 hours+) just to give me access to these songs?

ktsmith 15y ago
I'm curious if they really are doing that. It could lend some weight to their claims they don't need the music industries permission to launch a music service as they aren't streaming things, the users are accessing their own files.
- whyenot 15y ago
  I think they are. I bought the album and at first my locker had only a few of the songs marked as playable, a few minutes later, more were playable, and after maybe 5 minutes they were all playable. To me, the best explanation for this behavior was that it was taking some time for Amazon to copy all my purchased songs over to my locker. ps: I'm not a big Lady Gaga fan, but for 99 cents I figured I'd give it a whirl.
  - mikiem 15y ago
    ...and is the assumption that the Amazon music service uses AWS or something like it, and the speed of EBS or something like it is too slow at this scale for the songs to be instantly playable?
    - dustingetz 15y ago
      amazon cloud player is fast enough to stream songs to my 3G droid without skipping.
rudiger 15y ago
What is the reasoning behind not performing de-duplication of common files? It seems incredibly stupid to copy a popular song hundreds of thousands of times when a "single" canonical copy would do. Multiple people can stream music from a single file and people with large music collections would wait seconds instead of hours waiting for their songs to upload.

6ren 15y ago

> I tried this as an experiment to see if I wanted to order more music this way, but it only downloaded half the songs. Still a deal at 99cents, but not an experiment I’ll want to repeat with a full-price album. This is "expanding the userbase", and seems overwhelmingly successful. I've been thinking recently that "sales" (as in specials, temporary price reductions) are a socially acceptable way to do discriminatory pricing (different prices for different people). You want to do this because some people are happy to pay more (so you want to charge the higher price), and some people will only buy at a lower price. If you price it high, you lose the low people; if you price it low, you can't charge the high people a high price. It makes sense to therefore have offer high prices to high people, and low prices to low people. But people hate this! Amazon actually tried it for a while, until it was noticed (maybe they still do, but in a less discernible way?) A sale is a way to capture those low people, and only losing some high people. This is apart from getting them to be regular users.

jackowayed 15y ago
I agree with your analysis that sale = acceptable price discrimination, but I think there's more to it when they do a sale on release day. That's when most of the people willing to pay full price buy it! I think it's largely to get people to buy from them instead of iTunes and thus to try CloudDrive and their mp3 service. And also to price discriminate and get people who would have otherwise not bought to buy from them and try CloudDrive and their mp3 service.
busted 15y ago
The model of having regular sales to capture people who wouldn't otherwise buy, on a product that is digital so costs nothing to create (ie all costs are already sunk), is done really successfully with video games by Steam. People actually complain when there's a good Steam sale because they end up spending so much money, $5 or $10 at a time.

dr_ 15y ago

Looks like they weren't really ready for this. However download times appear to be improving. If you're stuck, trying pausing and restarting the download.

warmfuzzykitten 15y ago
It was quite speedy for me just now. No complaints.
smackfu 15y ago
Mine isn't even hung up in downloading; I don't even have the songs in my Cloud music thing. Half of them are just pending somehow.

warmfuzzykitten 15y ago

Seemed to be challenging to find the offer on Amazon. Here is the direct link http://tinyurl.com/3lkrosr http://tinyurl.com/3lkrosr Worked fine for me. 1-click purchase + download from cloud.

smackfu 15y ago
This would be a pretty good way to sneak in an affiliate link. Personally, I found it in a big banner ad on amazon.com/mp3
aw3c2 15y ago
Non-shortened actual direct link is http://www.amazon.com/Born-This-Way-digital-booklet/dp/B0051QIGP4/ http://www.amazon.com/Born-This-Way-digital-booklet/dp/B0051... Also without lots of parameters that might or might not include an affiliate strings. Please do not post shortened URLs here. It is obfuscation.
- pbhjpbhj 15y ago
  That link takes me to the album priced at $6.99 - did I miss the deal? -- Edit: Oh, also "It appears that you are attempting to use Amazon Cloud Player from outside the U.S. This service is intended for U.S. customers only." Globalisation it's the future!
  - turtle4 15y ago
    Yes, you missed the deal, but because it was available only on release day (5/23) at the discounted price, not because of your location.

jonnytran 15y ago

This is so irritating. Why do people expect new products to be infinitely scalable out of the gates. Of course they're going to show slowdown during a flash event. Because of people like this, great projects like Google Wave get shut down, and all because of people's irrational expectations. "It doesn't do everything... I'm never using this again." Startup projects grow slowly and organically. Just because it's coming from a big company, why do people expect it to be totally different.

kgermino 15y ago

I just bought it from my iPad, ( had to gift it to myself to get it to go through). I got it for free. It came up as a .99 album and a $.99 discount/promotion. I have no idea what happened unless they are making it free to make up for the technical issues. Also, I don't know if I get the 20gb for first album purchase (probably not but I can deal with that) or if it will end up in my cloud locker when I accept the 'gift'.

RyanKearney 15y ago
Was it your first purchase? My first Album purchase had a $2.99 promotion discount or something.

BasDirks 15y ago

People are way too harsh on Amazon. I mean who could have predicted that so many people would buy a 1 dollar album from arguably the most popular/controversial artist on the entire planet.