An Open Letter To Jeff Bezos

Jeff:

I’ve been an avid customer of Amazon.com for quite some time now, purchasing between $100 and $200 worth of books, DVDs, games, electronics, and music each month. I think the Amazon mp3 store is a prime example of how to sell music online, and it’s obvious that a great deal of thought has been placed in editorial pieces such as your annual ten best lists. I’ve always been happy to give Amazon my money, and joined your affiliate program because the company offers the chance for people who don’t have good local book stores and comic shops to pick up material I’ve enjoyed and discussed on my blog. Each month, I send between $1,000 and $3,000 of business your way through the affiliate links on the sites I maintain as well as a Twitter account set up for music, movie, and other geek-friendly deals. I’ve always had a good relationship with your company.

However, that relationship, which currently means between $13,000 and $26,000 per annum for your business, will be over unless you do not immediately take action to reverse your company’s new “Adult Materials Policy,” a blatantly homophobic and hypocritical rule that means that Alan Moore’s sexually explicit Victorian graphic novel Lost Girls is currently available through the sales rank-oriented search and lists, but not Radclyffe Hill’s acclaimed The Well of Loneliness, a lesbian romance set in the same era that features no sex. Some people with more patience than I have crafted a list that includes those two titles and several more egregious examples of this policy.

In an era where more people are becoming more accepting of those who aren’t like them – just look at our last presidential election – it’s a shame that the web’s largest retailer has decided to take a step back to the past and marginalize a vital segment of our society through rules that seem tailored to enforce a damaging, unhealthy status quo that has left so many leading unhappy lives. What’s next, removing black authors and materials about black culture from the sales ranks? If the web as we know it had existed in 1965, people would have been telling you that was the right thing to do, and they would have been as wrong then as your business is right now with this decision.

Yes, Jeff, you’re the CEO of just one online retailer, but it’s the biggest online retailer. Wouldn’t you like to give people one more reason to say that you’re the best? Hell, this decision may have passed you by entirely; and I’m willing to give you and those in your organization a chance to rectify this mess. I’m leaving the Amazon affiliate links on my site for another week, but if your decision has not changed by next Sunday, I’ll cancel my Amazon Prime membership, remove any and all affiliate links, and walk away from your company entirely.

Yours,
Kevin Church

For some reason, I’ve been listening to this song on repeat today.

Amazon MP3 Bargains: The Dance End Of Things.

One of the things I love about Amazon’s new MP3 service (aside from the broad selection, lack of DRM, and easy-to-use interface) is the way they’ve put entire DJ-mixed albums as a single track with the concurrent pricing. I’ve purchased quite a few things I’d either missed out on or just hadn’t bothered finding and ripping from my own collection and thought to myself “You know, I should share these deals with readers, who will then click-to-buy and give me pennies!”

LSG’s Rendevous In Outer Space is a proper trance album from Oliver Lieb, who’s sort of the Alan Moore of crazed, analog-synth obsessed Germans who make electronic music. He’s very clever in his use of melody, frequently burying something and having it emerge slowly over the course of three or four tracks before it explodes.

Peace Division’s Coast2Coast Mix just plain slams. Fantastic dark house records, mixed perfectly.

Markus Schulz: Amsterdam 08 offers melodic, electro-tinged trance and house that may be a bit cheesy sometimes, but I have very few problems with admitting that I enjoy such things on a regular basis, particularly if I’m working and don’t want to think too much.

Nick Warren’s GU30: Paris Mix once again displays his skills at doing more than just putting two records together. The range in these mixes is fantastic: the first part is a bit leftfield and downtempo while still providing enough head-nodding moments to engage you while the second works its way from deep space house to hands-in-the-air ecstasy.

Global Underground: Afterhours 3 is late night work music for hackers and junkies with tracks from The Cinematic Orchestra, Innersphere, Morgan Geist, and Cerrone taking the listener on a strange, beautiful journey into the deeper end of listener-friendly electronic music. It’s one of my favorite headphone albums, as it’s key-mixed as well as beatmatched, creating a great atmosphere for thinkin’ about junk like Batman.