Author: Ian C.

Many April Fool posts today, including that Amazon.com has created a “retro” home page:

Amazon April Fool page

It looks surprisingly usable, but sadly it doesn’t actually function as it’s just an image that clears when clicked. But it did prompt me to wonder if I was using Amazon.com that long ago – the answer surprisingly is “yes”! My first Amazon purchase was in May 1998, a technical book which presumably I could never have found at Barnes & Noble.
I found it interesting then to look my evolving purchase history over the years. I used to buy quite a lot of books from Amazon but that tailed off and then stopped in 2010 (not a coincidence surely that the iPad killed the book for me!)
I didn’t buy my first music CD till 2000, and I used to buy quite a lot – Amazon is great for getting hold of unusual music, or stuff only available in England. That’s even more true for videos; I bought my first DVD in 2000 too, and still today buy an occasional one (again, if it exists only in DVD format or is completely unavailable in the US market – my DVD player has no trouble with English format DVDs).

My first non-media purchase was in 2004 (soap!) but since 2011 those items are the most common purchases; I get quite a lot of clothing, wash/shave products and car care stuff from Amazon now. It’s also pretty clear when I got my Amazon Prime account, with Amazon spending jumping by a factor of five!

I don’t know about you, but I find these insights into “old” behaviors to be fascinating (like my previous Shazam post) …

Like (presumably) everyone, I’ve had Shazam on my iPhone for years and it’s occasionally identified some background music that’s annoying me with “… oh, who is that, I’m sure I’ve heard it before …”; I look at the result, am always impressed / amazed how it did it so quickly and even with all the other noise, and that’s about it. A few times I’ve followed through and purchased the track, but mostly it’s enough to know the name.

Today, reading this article about Shazam made me wonder if my App has a history list – and of course it does. Like the author, going back only to 2012, which must be when Shazam made some major tracking change to their App.
Looking at the list, I couldn’t see any way to do more with it – I don’t have a Spotify account like the author; but I wondered if a Shazam website might have similar data.
Going to www.shazam.com, the login link prompted a Facebook connection – I tried that, ensuring first that “can’t post” was selected. But still no data about “me”.
Of course, my Shazam App isn’t logged in via Facebook, so I tried that next. And presto, now the website had a list of all the tracks, along with a download button.

So here, in all it’s obscure glory, is the list of music that I had Shazam identify for me, over the last 2-1/2 years. The original list even has Google Map links for some tracks, so I know where as well as when I heard the music. Amazing!