I'm not a fan of DRM. And it's not because I'm a music pirate. Digital Rights Management schemes usually end up being a hassle to the people that actually pay for music online. Just ask all people who bought DRM-laden tunes from the Walmart music store—Walmart's about to shut down the DRM server, leaving paying customers out of luck.

Because of Apple's DRM, I tend not to buy things from the iTunes Store, opting instead for DRM-free options—Amazon's MP3 store, eMusic, and even physical CDs. Imagine my surprise then when I opened a recent order from Amazon, and instead of 13 discs full of 80's pop perfection, I got this:

No Duran Duran singles for me. Instead, I got a bunch of AOL promo CDs circa 1990-something. Let me say this again, the entire Duran Duran collection had been replaced by AOL CDs. Did I mention the box was shrink wrapped? And that it was ordered direct from Amazon, not from a third-party vendor selling via Amazon?

Confidential to the jerk at Amazon who's taking products out of boxes and re-shrink wrapping them: You totally, completely, utterly suck.

On a more positive note, Amazon's customer service was awesome. I had to hunt around a bit on the website to find out how to report a problem, but the click-to-call feature worked fine. I entered my telephone number, clicked a button, and in a minute or two was on the phone with a real, live human at Amazon. Still, it would be nice if they'd just publish a phone number somewhere, and not force you to burrow deep into the site and enter your number in a web form to get to a human (for the record, a little Googling reveals that (800) 201-7575 gets you right to Amazon Customer service).

The customer service agent was polite and helpful, although a little befuddled when I explained that, technically speaking, I had received the shipment, but that the box didn't actually contain the product. She emailed me a return shipping label, and expedited a replacement. Two days later, I was wearing my skinny tie, sitting on the bow of my sailboat, singing about some girl named Rio who dances on the sand. OK, no, not really. I was actually just sitting in front of my Mac with headphones on, but anyway....

I'm still not quite convinced digital downloads are going to kill physical media anytime soon, but clearly physical product can also have its own issues.