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Comment by eastbound | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Prime does music very well. You click on a song, and another song of the same artist play, and you get a message saying you have to buy a supplementary fee to play what you want (I already pay for prime).

Genius. Explicitly not do what the user wants.

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The whole galaxy of Prime services surrounding package delivery would never survive on its own -- or, another way to see it is that they don't have the market pressure necessary to improve/get fixed due to how they are tied to the package delivery.

Prime music for the reason you give, Prime video who keeps finding way to suggest you movies you need to pay extra for (you go specifically to "free/included", you click a couple times, and you're being recommended extra costs things ...), Amazon Drive keeps your file "forever" but then no sorry we're deleting them we stop this but then wait no we're making Amazon Photos now your photos will be kept everything else deleted but wait no only some photos will be transfered ...

The people managing those services are coasting on other people's success.

Agreed. I see the other 'prime' labeled services as a negative value frankly, because I know that the entire intent is to make the process frustrating enough to upsell me to their amazon branded services which are universally inferior to the other options I would have picked in the absence of the 'free' 'prime' offering. I've finally converted enough of my online shopping to target and Walmart that this is the year I'm doing away with amazon prime for good.

I’m so glad that I’m not the only one who thinks this is serious heavy duty dumb.

Last night I saw an ad that seemed to imply Amazon Music would now be included with Prime. I thought, hmm, let me check if it still does the thing where you can’t play what you tap. Yup. Still does it. Tap a song and some other random song plays.

Somewhere deep in the bowels of Amazon there is an exec who thinks this is a brilliant way to drive conversion. Probably has some data that somehow supports this notion. Amazing.

I agree it’s dumb but maybe you overestimate the masses. Maybe on some level it works for the execs, especially in the short term.

That's what powvans is referring to with "brilliant way to drive conversion". Measure "engagement" by "how many songs the user starts playing" and combine that with "clicking on a song the first time actually plays a different song" and you'll get more clicks to start songs as the user tries to correct their problems. This isn't a good thing, the metric has been over-optimized, but if you're paid by metrics this is what happens.

Likely there is a programmer or two well aware of the issue and the presumably 1-10 line fix, but has either tried it and been told to revert it, or simply knows they can't push it, because they know what it would do to the metrics.

Probably a good number of the complaints people are leveling here against Amazon services source from that. For instance, mixing paid options into the list as quickly as possible when you explicitly asked for free stuff can't hardly help but "convert better" than letting the user truly browse through the free stuff; if so much as one person ever gives in and buys something that way, or even browses, leaves, comes back to the same screen later and forgot they were supposedly looking at free stuff and buys something, boom, better conversion rate than pure free. Doesn't take much to move the needle off of "zero". But it's still not what we asked for. (& yes, I know that it's non-free stuff in the recommendations when viewing a free option, not unfree stuff mixed right into free carousel, but I think it's fair to say customers are definitely interested in a "free only right now please" view and a good percentage of them probably think that's what they're getting when they're in the "free" tabs.)

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