Just the other day I was lucky enough to be able to say that I had successfully completed all of my Christmas shopping well in advance of Christmas eve so I decided to spend the evening in front of the television with a glass of wine while I done some serious gift wrapping.
It was at this point I came up with a problem and realised that I had bought a friend some music for their Christmas gift. Wrapping up the latest Aerosmith album never used to pose much of a problem but that was before the introduction of MP3’s. Wrapping a compact disc up is fairly straight forward but how on earth do you go about wrapping up the gift of an MP3? After all no one wants CD’s anymore and the majority of music that we consume is done through digital downloads.
So, how exactly do you give someone an MP3 as a gift? After all an MP3 is not a physical item. It exists in the virtual world only.
My first idea was that I should have maybe just gave the friend in question a gift card for amazon or iTunes but since I had already made the purchase I did not have this option.
Another friend of mine made several suggestions on how to give the gift of an MP3. Her suggestion was to print off a copy of the album cover and give it in a card along with a note explaining that the gift is in MP3 format. Then there is the option of burning the MP3’s to a CD-ROM or perhaps copying them onto a USB flash drive and presenting the gift that way. I can imagine that some of you might well be thinking that giving MP3’s on a USB stick is a little boring but there are actually some pretty trendy looking novelty USB sticks out there which would be a great way to give MP3’s as a gift and then the recipient of the MP3 gift would be able to use the USB stick for its intended purpose once the MP3’s are on their chosen device.
It turned out that the best way I could come up with to wrap up an MP£ or to give an MP3 as a gift was to use the gift service that sites such as amazon or iTunes offer.
To use this you simply head on over to iTunes or amazon and when you are going through the purchase process you will notice that there is an option to gift the music to someone (you can gift apps as well on iTunes). If you chose this option then whichever service you are using will deliver the music via your friends email address. As you can imagine this comes in extremely handy for those of you out there who leave gift shopping till the very last minute and possibly even forget until it is too late.
This option sure beats having to steal someone’s iPod in order to transfer the music on to the device.
Follow Us!