This is a note to all folks out there who are intimately familiar with Amazon’s API but if somebody could create something simple to do this, I’d be extremely happy (as would the RIAA, for that matter).
Here’s my situation. My wife is trying to create a custom CD for a friend of hers, consisting of some older (Golden Oldies-era, 50s and 60s) type of music. Since we’re really not in the mood to piss of the RIAA by downloading MP3s illegally, and these are fairly popular classics (“Stand By Me” was one of the songs she was looking for), we were curious how much it would cost to buy a CD or two with those particular songs on it (they’re all from the same era, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find them on just a few CDs).
So here’s what I’d like the application/service to do: We would put in a title and artist for a song we’re looking for (“Stand by Me” by Ben E. King, for example). It would then return the cheapest way to acquire that song. It would a have an option to take several songs and find the cheapest way to get all of them. Maybe one of the used sellers has several of the CDs, so we could save on shipping. Or one CD, while more expensive, has several of the songs we’re looking for on it, saving us the cost of buying several CDs.
I would think the RIAA would love this. I’d be legally buying all the CDs I’m trying to make a mix CD from, which is all perfectly legal (as long as I give the CDs to the person I’m making the mix CD for, transferring of ownership, blah, blah…). And I’d probably sleep a bit better at night. Maybe.
Of course, if the RIAA has a fit about something like this (“We’re not making enough money, etc…”) then the program should have a function that will only search record labels that aren’t members of the RIAA.
Anybody out there willing to try programming something like this? I’m not totally familiar with Amazon Web Services, so I don’t even know if something like this is possible, but I figured I’d throw it out there.
Comments
Slightly off-topic:
Did you know that in the Netherlands you have to pay 10 cents extra for every bought CD-R?
Our nation’s beloved RIAA managed to convince our government that they were suffering terribly from illegal copies that we now pay a surplus on writable CDs, regardless whether we use them to back stuff up, make our own slideshow, compose our family video-cd, or whatever.
Long live the music industry!
Why don’t you just compile the music you want on iTunes (or something similar)? It’s only 99 cents per song, and it’s legal. And it saves you a programming headache 🙂
Jon: Because you know I like to make things difficult 😉
Actually, I didn’t go that approach for a couple reasons: 1) They didn’t have all the songs we need, and 2) They’re not super great quality. They’re good, but not perfect (at least it’s my understanding that iTunes’ audio file format is a lossy format — I don’t know if you can get them from there lossless).