Amazon Goodness

I have slightly obscure tastes in music – particularly, I like musicals, not the highlights CDs the full recording of the original cast. It’s certainly not the most obscure taste in music but it does lead to an awful lot of trouble tracking down what I want and worse still I know what I want ahead of time unlike most people with really obscure tastes who just stumble across things they like. Coming back to the point though, you can’t just walk into HMV or pretty much any music store that I’ve found and pick up a copy of the original 1986 cast recording of The Phantom of The Opera or Miss Saigon or Les Miserables. However with this new fangled technology intarweb thingy I can head on over to Amazon and order it from there. There’s a bunch of other online stores around that may or may not have what I want for prices roughly equal to Amazon but what I love about Amazon is watching it try to predict my buying habits. I know most people freak out about privacy violations when computer systems start gathering data about them but with Amazon it’s like a fun game. It managed to pick that I was looking to purchase Miss Saigon and The Phantom Of The Opera the last time I went there and offered a package deal on them. It’s recommendations are also really quite good – including detecting that I tend to buy the versions that Lea Salonga is in (she tends to be part of the original cast of a lot of big musicals). Sadly, it doesn’t seem to have worked out that I only buy CDs from them as it keeps offering books and sheet music. While I do tend to buy a fair bit of sheet music of musicals I won’t purchase it without first flicking through it to make sure I have a chance of being able to play it. The big downside of buying from Amazon though is I have to wait two and a half weeks for things to arrive (that or pay an extra arm for postage).