Starting today, customers who buy eligible CDs or have purchased CDs after 1998 are given the MP3 equivalent for free. So you get a physical copy and a digital copy. What do you guys think? Will this change how you buy music?
For me, possibly. I would love to own both a physical and digital copy and I just so happen to have a Kindle so this sort of becomes an incentive to me.
Thoughts on this? Can it compete with iTunes?

Edited: Issue with post not posting correctly.

Amazing thing. Amazon amazes.

Thats a good idea and helps save your precious cd.

Finally!
Lets hope this will start to topple the corrupt way music and movie publishers have been ripping off people the past 20-30 years.

I will start buying all my music on amazon from now on. Lets hope they do the same with books. Buy the book, get the e-book for free.
Hopefully it will also be the start of the way game publishers deal with licenses. If I buy a game on PS3 (or XBOX), I want to be able to play it on the PC/Mac/Linux too. Now I have to buy the same game twice or 3 times just to play it on a different platform.

really nice... I was about to buy a digital copy of a CD I really, but now I wait until it is available for me as well (Digital Version of the CD shall be released on 17th January, so I will see if I get it for free)

For a big, evil corporation, Amazon is pretty good to its customers (and quick to take responsibility for and fix its fuck-ups.) I would be all over that offer if it didn't cost $12 to ship a CD to Canada. That's more than the cost of a mp3 album. I might as well just buy the mp3 version on iTunes and keep all my music in a single cloud.

Another try to push the amazon cloud service. Read about it yesterday and I think AutoRip is an interesting and good service. But since they removed the shopping basket for mp3 purchases to force the users to use the cloud I don't buy any music there anymore.

Don't you still get the drm free mp3s anyway? Amazon is quite interesting on the evil side. I can speak only for Germany, while it isn't perfect or even 'good' how they tread many of theit employees, it isn't worse than what other companies do. And they are quite nifty in exploiting legal loopholes, which is funnily enoug a good thing, because this often leads to em being fixed.

Yes, you can download each single title or whole album.

I like the cloud... I can play the music from everywhere I am, or I can download it and put on my MP3 Player.

The only benefit I see from this is that you get access to the music immediately after you've purchased it, which is a good thing of course. But simply getting "access" to DRM free (if they are that) MP3s of a physical CD you've bought is completely redundant, since it takes only about 2 minutes to rip it yourself.

Should maybe go more in detail here. The cloud itself is a good service, because now you have the option to redownload all your stuff. So I'm not against the cloud itself here, it's just annoying to manage my purchases without the basket and been forced to use the 1click-buy option for instant-purchases. I normally don't buy only a single album, I loved to browse the catalog to first collect and later sort out some albums. I also really hate to see all my single purchases now on my bank statement.

So, AutoRip and the Cloud are great services, but without the basket shopping is right now kind of uncomfortable for me.

I think the biggest benefit is for those who now retroactively get a lot of mp3s. I never understood the point of CDs anyway. It's digital data, just like a mp3. Why restrict its usage by binding it to some physical load.

Well, probably because mp3 has much lower quality?

Not a bad thing, but also not really neccessary in my eyes. In my collection of about 500 CDs, there's a single one from which I can't easily make a digital copy myself.

Would've been a far better feature I they would give away free downloads for older vinyl records you buy at Amazon. For these records it's much more complicated to get a good digital copy.