After price update, Amazon Prime members call Amazon Music “unusable”
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
The icing on the cake is there's a listen button on the album and each track, which when clicked plays a _random unrelated_ song. Sometimes I feel like I'm living in an alternate dimension.
Amazon was the only music store offering some major artist music I could use (not buying a Mac just to buy stuff on iTunes), not sure how I'll get music now.
https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#med...
1. Product, in alignment with directors and VPs, have an overarching 3-5 year vision document
2. The document talks about “customer obsession” and a 2025 vision for “delighting customers”
3. Document has mostly fluff ideas, written by some MBA grad, on an H1B visa, who is feeling pressure to deliver a grand vision. Both to get promoted (eventually) and mainly to keep their job. If they get fired, they have 30 days to find a new company that will employ them with visa sponsorship. Or they have to move back to Hyderabad or whichever Indian city.
4. Document goes through several rounds of review, where this poor PM gets ripped a new one, many many times. In 1:1 with their manager, they are coached on having a thick skin and being able to handle verbal abuse and being made to feel small. Keep in mind, this person doesn’t really use Amazon Music themself. They just want to turn in their work, get paid, and go home.
5. Eventually, the product team aligns on increasing subscriptions X% YoY and increasing revenue Y%, by end of 2023 or mid 2024. Since we have some agreement already about to go in effect which will expand the music catalog, let’s leverage that. We’ll restrict the non-paid streaming option, and sell it as offering our premium customers (since that’s the metric we care about) more variety. Indeed we are “delighting customers” and “streamlining the music listening and discovery journey” <—- I shit you not. This is exactly how these docs are written.
6. This is reviewed and signed off by layers of directors and VPs. Keep in mind none of these people use Amazon Music. If anything, some of them might even have disdain for music.
7. The changes roll out. There’s an A/B test, designed in a way to not completely obscure reality but still give us what we want. End customers unhappy.
8. Product team works with technical team to look at specific A/B test results. Results show subscriptions are actually up. The measured increase is statistically significant. Music listening time is overall flat or increased slightly as well, but definitely not a regression.
9. Product team celebrates. Product team knows the product is worse off, customers are unhappy, etc. but the “metrics” we have show a win.
10. PM hangs out for several years. Realizes they can’t get promoted to a principal and leaves for another company, or they get annoyed with the whole visa back and forth process. They move to Canada and find some other Amazon team there, or they just go back to India once the initial stocks vest.
11. Cue the next round of MBA talent, looping through step 1.
P.S I am on H1 visa. For sure I am offended.
Put them all together to advocate together and think of what they will want done with you.
They've already got the angle to exploit you on lined up. And secretly, this is what they think. So what happens when you give them the power?
> P.S I am on H1 visa. For sure I am offended.
Most of these PMs are Indians on H1Bs. The incentive designed by the company is extracting a certain output, under specific work conditions, and it requires bringing employees to the US, at scale, and having their visa situation hanging over their head.
If you’re offended that Amazon is able to do that, at scale - I don’t fault you.
If you’re offended that I’m openly discussing this, then I would say I don’t agree with censoring what’s in fact reality.
So many questionable decisions were made, at least during my time at Amazon, because of a cut throat environment of fear. I had 1:1s where Indian employees would cry about the situation they find themselves in, where they often have to agree or do things they don’t want to do, out of fear of losing their job and having to relocate back to India.
Skip limits, inability to rewind, and for some reason the app keeps nagging me to grant control over Bluetooth on my device, which I keep saying no to.
All my carefully curated playlists are now gone - user playlists are no longer a feature. Instead, you play a track, and then Prime selects every subsequent track based on "similarity". Don't like a track? Ah, well, there is a "skip limit", so you can only skip tracks so many times per month?!?
Who the hell thought of a skip limit?!
I haven't used it since. They've completely destroyed a really good Prime benefit. After this, I'd rather pay more for Spotify than pay for the paid Amazon Music tier :-/
Removing the ability to skip really sucks but my commute is not long enough to justify paying for Spotify or for the premium Amazon Music thing. I'm using a few limited playlists on Amazon that still allow skipping but may just go back to FM radio.
At this point there are very few benefits we're getting with Prime aside from shipping (I watch a couple of shows like The Boys, Peripheral, etc.) so I really hate they don't have an unbundled Prime just for free shipping.
Does HN crowd in general not resort to pirating music? Obviously piracy is unethical but it is the best way I can enjoy music. No ads. I still have all the songs I had like 20 years back. And many other positives.
I would settle for being able to strip DRM simply and quickly from media I could "buy".
Oddly around the same time shipping seemed to speed up from other retailers like Best Buy, Target, Adorama, etc. I buy things from Japan on Ebay and get them more quickly than packages from AMZN. Every other retailer sees shipping as a way to impress me, AMZN takes me for granted because I've been paying for Prime for 10 years.
There are accounts that people in the same ZIP codes as AMZN fulfillment centers aren't getting 2 day shipping. I guess these are rural areas with poor shopping options and AMZN doesn't need to be competitive. I'm pretty sure though that my congressman gets next day or same day shipping in Washington, DC.
I agree not to pay prime if they can't deliver. That said, I get 0/1/2 day delivery most of the time, but I live in a city.
In downtown Seattle/SLU area (aka "Amazon rainforest", due to that whole area having a very heavy concentration of Amazon offices), most packages take around 2 days. In Atlanta area (midtown and closeby sorta-suburban areas like Little Five and Edgewood), most packages take between same-day to 1-2 days (usually a bit less time than in Seattle). In NYC (Manhattan specifically), it takes 3-4 days (am yet to find a single item on amazon that has a delivery estimate less than that for this area).
I bet it has something to do with distribution centers/warehouses/last-mile delivery infrastructure. But that difference in delivery times between those three regions seems to be pretty consistent, from what I've observed so far in 2022.
The reason residential real estate keeps going up is partially due to zoning laws being out of wack on west coast. So just because the price of residential real estate in Kent keeps getting crazier, that doesn't mean the industrial one does as much.
Where I live now, Prime shipping is usually 4 days, sometimes longer.