Amazon.com’s MP3 Store and Killer Customer Service

Recently, my beloved Yahoo Music Unlimited decided to shutter its doors and move all of us subscribers to Rhapsody. That’s all fine and dandy, but I thought that I might check out Amazon.com’s MP3 store as well for another alternative.

You see, Amazon has the support of all the major labels, and sells high bit-rate MP3 files with no DRM. That means I can download it and play it on pretty much any device out there without restriction. It’s the way music SHOULD be.

Anyway, I bought five albums last night and shuttled them over to my iPhone. When listening today, I realized that one of the albums I had bought was a CLEAN version. That basically means it was edited to take out the cuss words. In my case it changed the line “you’re such a fucking hypocrite” to “you’re such a little hypocrite.” Kinda changed the impact for me, and being a collector, I want originals anyway, not edited versions.

So I looked on Amazon and they made no mention of it being edited, they just had another version called EXPLICIT. Ahhhh, so if the album has bad words, it will say EXPLICIT. Cool, my bad. But I figured I would see if there was any way I could get the explicit version. So I sent a nice quick email to customer support to see if anything could be done. I also suggested that they might be able to allow us users to set a preference to only see the actual version or the clean version, or maybe make some denotation if the version you are buying is edited.

I fully expected a nice response saying sorry, but we can’t exchange downloaded MP3’s. I was surprised when i got this instead:

Thank you for writing to us at Amazon.com.

 

I am sorry to learn that you have made an incorrect purchase. As a standard policy, Amazon MP3 Music Downloads are not returnable.

 

However, because of the circumstances I have made an exception and issued a refund in the amount of $9.99 for the item “Finding Beauty In Negative Spaces” by ‘Seether’. This refund should go through within the next 2 to 3 business days and will appear as a credit on your next credit card billing statement.

 

Once the refund has been completed, I’d suggest you to return to our website and place an order for the correct album.

 

It is always important for us to hear how customers react to all aspects of shopping at Amazon.com. Strong customer feedback like yours helps us continue to improve the selection and service we provide, and we appreciate the time you took to write to us. I’ve passed your feedback along to the Amazon MP3 Music team.

 

I hope that this is a satisfactory solution.

 

Thank you for shopping at Amazon.com.

Um, hell yeah. That solution exceeded my expectations by a mile, and as soon as I get home tonight I’ll be downloading the correct version and deleting the wrong one. Amazon.com has made it SO easy to buy and enjoy music. And after downloading your files, Amazon can put them right into iTunes or Windows Media Player for you.

If you need to buy music, I would really like you to try Amazon. You get higher quality files without DRM that can play anywhere, even on that iPod of yours. Don’t think you NEED to shop at iTunes for your music. You don’t. And if Amazon keeps up with customer service like this, they are going to steal a LOT of sales from Apple.