I noticed Amazon no longer has 30 second previews of songs? If you open the player it asks you to trial Amazon music. I guess they feel with streaming it is not needed to hear before you buy?

That is a bummer, a greedy one at the wrong time. AllMusic, Deep Discount, CD Universe -now it takes multiple searches for free previews, Or the full songs- maybe- at Bandcamp and Youtube.

spotify?

Last time I listened to Spotify they had so many ads you couldn't skip through, maybe it's different now but i didn't want to pay them.

Sometimes an artist's site features clips of an album's songs.

it's still like that, you can usually get 3 or 4 songs between ads, but there is always an ad after the first song that you listen to no matter what.

i tolerate it because i really don;t use it that often at all.

it's a good place to get that one-off that might not be on you tube.

It is not only that. I have also noticed on the website, they often don't even have a list of the tracks on the album/CD. I have needed to go to AllMusic or Discogs to check the track listing when looking for track information.

It really stinks. Amazon is really the last place for attaining physical product, so why would they cut out previews that could result in a sale? When you already are paying for prime, if you're a buyer of physical product, are you additionally going to pay for streaming?

I could be wrong about this but I believe the digital copy of albums on Amazon usually includes audio samples, so when you're looking at a CD or LP you should click the "See All Formats" link & find the digital version. Of course those samples (and track listings) should be included with all formats but at least they can be found with just a little digging. Hope this is helpful.

It used to be that way; that the digital copies contained the samples. I have dug to find the samples and have come to the Amazon Music Unlimited. $7.99 per month for Prime members (Non-Prime member pricing of $9.99 per month) every time. This is something that has changed somewhat recently, apparently.

The problem is that the clips aren't free to retailers anymore. There's tremendous pressure for all streams, even snippets, to generate a fee for publishers, labels, artists. The other retailers mentioned in this thread will all end up dropping their own audio previews sooner or later, leaving the streams only on services that are already monetising all their listening.

I have Amazon's HD service even though I'm a collector of physical products (to address Eric's point). It's not expensive to have music on-demand everywhere you are, but I agree that it would be better to offer free clips upfront. YouTube is usually the best free source for sampling audio (MP3 quality) before buying the physical album. I like to put YT samples in every release thread for forthcoming titles, when available.

That's good for complete songs, but it doesn't give you a taste of every track.

you can do that on spotify.

True, but if Amazon's intent is to keep me in their ecosystem and provide me with enough information/inspiration to quickly precipitate a purchase, then they've failed.

It seems they're betting that the cost of providing the streaming samples on their own site outweighs any potential lost sales.

Agreed. This is a baffling, counter-intuitive move.
And thank you, Linda, for the explanation. That makes complete sense but is short-sighted (for them) in that it may eliminate a percentage of sales.

From Linda's statement, seems the music industry greed is more at fault than Amazon. They want to charge a license fee to use a 30 second snippet of a song, and also charge Amazon for the streaming rights to the full songs on Amazon Music. That is a short-sighted, greedy move, totally in keeping with the recording industry,and not at all surprising. I don't know that I can really blame Amazon for not choosing to pay them twice.

I think Amazon represents enough of the music industry's sales at this point that if they just told the labels that there is no point in them bothering to sell their product anymore if the customer can't listen to a 30-60 second snippet of a song, they would cave pretty quickly.

Looks like Amazon has returned the song previews. About time...