Amazon MP3 Download: Jeff Beck, ‘Heart Full of Soul’

I’ve been trying out some new music download options lately. I was happy to see that Amazon started selling non-DRM MP3 files for about a dollar each. I think a dollar is too much for individual song downloads, but I wanted to try it out and help show that people are willing to pay for unrestricted music even when it can be had for free.

Not totally unrestricted, of course. MP3 is still patent encumbered. I’d much prefer Ogg Vorbis. Ogg is free as in freedom and supposedly it is technically better, although my tin ears wouldn’t know the difference. And the name “Ogg” sounds cool. I’m reluctantly willing to go along with MP3 since I already have a huge library of MP3 songs and there are a couple of devices I use that don’t support Ogg. Sure, it may be coming off patent in a few years, but screw the patent holders. (And damn the whole patent system.) Let’s dump MP3 and go OGG. (ME OGG. ME WANT FREE FORMAT.)

You have to pay for each song separately. I’d rather buy five to ten dollars worth at a time, to avoid entering in all the separate transactions in my money program. (You’d think Amazon would want to arrange something like this also, to avoid processing fees.) I think I would spend more money if songs were offered at a quarter a piece. I might download up to four songs per day at $0.25, but I probably won’t buy one song per day at $0.99. At least I wish they’d consider offering anything over ten years old for a quarter or less. I have a lot of back-catalog songs I want to pick up, but not at a buck a pop.

I had been wanting to hear/get the original version of “Heart Full of Soul” after hearing the Rush cover version on Feedback. Recently I saw a reference to the song, so I went looking on Amazon. My search brought up a song by that title by Jeff Beck, and the sample sounded like what I had in my head as the original song, so I downloaded it. Easy to do since I regularly use Amazon and they have all my information. (I, for one, welcome our new data-mining overlords…)

It’s all pretty straight-forward and works smoothly. The 256kbps bit rate is fine. I’m usually happy with 128-192. 256 may sound better, of course, but it takes up more space. I’m not concerned about hard drive space all that much, but these all have to be backed up over the network and to DVD and that creates more overhead. It’s also nice to have the proper meta tag information all filled in.

What the RIAA doesn’t understand is that people like me are happy to pay for the convenience of quickly finding a good quality copy of a song. For the hypothetical freebie downloader, it’s a pain in the ass to get music. First that person would have to find it, download over flaky connections, listen to it carefully the first time to determine if it’s a good copy, and then track down meta information like the album it appeared on and the year it was released. This all hypothetically takes a long time.

Back to “Heart Full of Soul,” I was surprised to see that the meta information had 2006 as the year released, and “Shapes of Things” as the album. Looking further, I wasn’t surprised to see that it was actually The Yardbirds who originally recorded the song in 1965 (and included Beck at the time). Further investigation turns up a 2003 Jeff Beck import, Shapes of Things, that includes the song. I’m guessing it’s the original. So, mixed results on the meta info this time. The Shapes of Things album year seems to be wrong, and though it is probably the proximate source of the song, you have to do some research to discover the true pedigree of these songs that have been around forever.

And that was my initial Amazon MP3 experience. It’s nice to see convenient, legal download services continuing to spring up. As usual, I’ve included Amazon affiliate links. If you follow one of the Amazon links above and buy something, I’ll get a cut.