My Head in the Amazon Cloud

Our household has recently bought in to the Amazon cloud music library storage model. I’m not the primary account holder, and I don’t understand how it works very well, but it’s a nice way to get music that I actually own downloaded to my phone.  We’ve begun the long, slow process of ripping our CD collection (somewhere around 500 CDs at last count, which was years ago) and uploading it to the cloud.

I love that when I buy a digital copy of an album or upload a newly purchased CD from an American band, all of the song titles and album art go with the sound files. When I download it to my phone, it’s all there. Sometimes with imports like Momentum’s Fixation, at Rest, or albums off of smaller labels like Tomten’s Wednesday’s Children, Amazon doesn’t recognize the album and instead of album art just uses a generic equalizer graphic on my phone, or an Amazon logo on the laptop. I can live with that.

But what I can’t live with is when Amazon makes a best guess. Take for example, the independent release from Lemolo, Kaleidoscope. When I bring it up on my phone, the icon for the album is the cover of Radiohead’s Amnesiac. Ha ha, Amazon.

Inexplicable Cover Art

Equally preposterous is the fate of black-death metal band Gone Postal’s {2018 update: now signed and renamed Zhrine} live 4-track demo Unortheta. I wouldn’t expect Amazon to have it on file -it’s not even available for sale. And given the recording quality, I would be surprised if the CD even included a jpeg file for the black and white photocopied cover. But after I uploaded the disk to the cloud, it took me a while to find it. My eye just refused to focus on this artwork while looking for Gone Postal:

I’m not sure what album this is the cover for, but I’m pretty sure it’s not the one that came with my Ahn Trio Piano Trios CD.

Very funny. When the cover of my Blue Hearts album that my husband scoured Japanese record stores for after I loved the movie Linda Linda Linda is replaced by The Peanuts it’s a little more annoying. And I get really steamed when I pull up Circle of Suffering by death metal band Angist and find the artwork from Creed’s Full Circle.

The Worst Case

The worst though, is what Amazon did to ambient industrial black metal band Kontinuum’s debut album Earth Blood Magic – witness, Gypsy Blood.

I got a preview copy of Earth Blood Magic back in August or September, and it took me weeks to listen to it because every time I pulled it up I had to look at 80’s ponytail earring man. Even knowing it was wrong the cover, that picture tainted my first couple dozen listens to the album. Even worse, the actual album art is a striking piece of art by founding Sólstafir drummer, Guðmundur Óli Pálmason.

I’m not just whining here, though. I’m begging for help. Somebody out there has to know how to manually replace cover art images on the Amazon cloud. I know I’m being incredibly uptight about this, but it really bothers me. Someone, help me please!

{2018 update: When Amazon started charging for storage, we switched to Google Play. I don’t love it either. We never did get all 500+ CDs uploaded, and I’ve started buying physical CDs again, just because I don’t trust the vagaries of the cloud. Too much gets lost when you switch services, and I don’t believe any service will earn my life-long loyalty.}