Gentlemen (and by gentlemen, I mean “unidentified label who has just released the downloadable edition of the soundtracks to a couple of movie spinoffs of a certain favorite British sci-fi show of mine”), I’ve called you here today to discuss your download service.
I’m one of the good guys. If I was so inclined, I probably could’ve waited a while and gotten this for free, but I’ve been waiting so long for this release that I’m happy to brave the exchange rate and put my money on the table to get it now. I tend to do this with music – I find the shortest point between my money and the artist (or in this case, probably their estates, since we’re talking about a couple of four-and-a-half-decade-old film scores) and buy online that way, thus cutting out as many middle-men as possible. Were it possible for me to walk over and put cash in your hand and give you an embarrassing hug in public for releasing this admittedly very very niche stuff, I’d do it. But you’re in England. That complicates things. My arms aren’t that long (see, you lucked out!) and my cash doesn’t have the Queen’s face on it.
But man, unnamed label, you have got to do something about your server slowness. That kinda stuff scares the bejeezus out of me – I don’t want to click a second time for fear that I’ll be charged a second time. Probably 10-15 minutes between clicking the “buy MP3 album” button and finally getting to where I can start downloading. And then the downloading…dear Lord. Slooooow. Which is bordering on downright silly considering how short some of the tracks are (many don’t even top a minute and a half). Maybe everyone else was downloading it at the same time. It’s daylight over there – got that. Haven’t had much of it over here lately, though. Must be nice.
Anyway, back to the music download: the deal is this. I understand stuff like heavy server loads, but it seems to me like something isn’t working somewhere when it takes a quarter hour to get from “Here I am with money in hand, wanting to download this” to “You have my money, now I’m downloading this”. I’ve downloaded entire brand-new episodes of the aforementioned show in less time than it took me to download, track-by-track, a soundtrack album that stops just short of filling a 70-minute CD. I’m aware that there’s a grey area here where I’m admitting to hitting the newsgroups for something, but the point is: the user experience should be better, faster, and easier for a paid download. This isn’t the first time I’ve bought downloadable tracks from you before, and I had the same problems last time – in fact, last time I had to log in and re-download a few tracks. It’s already hard enough to convince folks to do what I did and buy the stuff instead of doing the internetical equivalent of the five-fingered discount. A frustrating experience for the user isn’t going to help that.
Oh, and how about the booklets, in PDF form or something? I kinda dislike the second-class-citizen treatment because I’m “just” downloading instead of buying the CD.
The surprisingly sharp, well-remastered soundtrack to Dr. Who & The Daleks and Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. is now available for download from the label that shall not be named; the CD will be out in October. It’s great for a weekend download – you’ll have time to go pick up the pizza while waiting for your order to process…
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