Of Recordings

If Beatport gets it wrong, who gets it right? Amazon! Shopping for MP3s on Amazon is exactly like shopping for books or blenders. And yes, that’s a good thing. They have spent years refining the buying process on their site– just look at the careful phrasing of the prompts that walk you through signing in and checking out. Why throw out everything you’ve learned to sell another product?

When you’ve been online for a while, you develop an intuition about how web pages work. Many of these intuitions are very subtle, and you probably won’t notice them unless you’ve studied human-computer interaction. A well-designed site like Amazon takes advantage of these expectations to make the sales process easier. A Flash gadget like Beatport’s breaks your expectations and forces you to learn new details.

Of course, Amazon is not DJ-oriented the way Beatport is. But if Beatport (or a competitor; I’m not picky) combined those great DJ features with Amazon’s ease of use, then we would have a killer online record shop. And a music fiend like me would be in heaven.

I was on Amazon, looking for the new Autechre album (there’s a review over at Electronic Music World) and I noticed that it was the fourth best-selling album in Music > Dance & DJ > Techno.

For the moment, let’s just accept this broad definition of “techno.” The real question is, what are the topselling techno albums on Amazon?

Number two was “Play” by Moby. Which is an OK record, and I admit to listening to it quite a bit in high school. But it’s almost 10 years old; that dude is getting a lot of mileage out of one duet with Gwen Stefani.

Number one was the soundtrack to Marie Antoinette. Uhm, what? Well, apparently it includes a couple Aphex Twin tracks.

So now you have the secret to becoming a best-selling techno artist: get your music on the same record as rock stars.