XBox Music

Some time ago, Spotify offered a free 6 month (it may have been three, my memory fails me a little) trial of their "Premium" service. I had never been interested before for two main reasons, firstly I'm from an age where I own thousands of CDs and Records (yes, vinyl), so I like to keep stuff after I've paid for it. Secondly, I listen to music mainly through my mobile these days. The long sessions of listening to music in the evenings of years gone by have been largely replaced with other media (video or games). My music primarily takes place when I'm travelling or working (which still accounts for many hours in an average day).

With all this in mind the ability to play music on my mobile appealed, so I signed up for the trial. I did use this a few times, but due to having a lot going on at that time, not as much as I expected.

Then after one month, my free trial finished.

WTF?

The upshot was that I didn't have enough time to see the benefits, and I was a little upset by the premature expiration. No sale Spotify.

I went back to buying CDs, and the occasional MP3.

However, being a Windows Phone user, I'd always been vaguely intrigued by the concept of the Zune Music Pass, but not enough to actually do anything about it.

Recent talk by Paul Thurrott on Windows Weekly and the Win Super Site reminded me of this service recently however. To cut a long story a bit shorter, I mentioned the Zume music service to a work friend (who also has a Windows Phone), and as an ex-user of the service before having a Windows Phone, he re-signed that night. The following morning he showed me the service working on his mobile, and I'm interested enough to have now signed up to the 14 day trial.

We'll see how it goes, so far I'm impressed how slick it all is... although as I already mentioned it's hard for an old git like me to grasp the concept of not physically own things (despite being an occasional user of Love Film Instant).

I may well end up getting the monthly subscription until Windows 8 (and the built in integrated music apps) become my primary OS, by which time I would have either lost interest or will decide to go for the yearly subscription. I wonder what it will be called by then?

Of course, this may also have a small effect on my thoughts of the announced Lumia 920 not having an SD card... to a minor extent (although I'm still not impressed by that decision).

Looks like I'm in real danger of being fully sucked into the Microsoft ecosystem.... but at least I'm doing this knowingly and with the knowledge that alternatives are available, and trust me when I say that Microsoft must continue to deliver the goods to keep me sucking at the teat.

Oh, and unlike Spotify, Zune doesn't seem to broadcast everything I listen to, to all my "friends" on Facebook.

Any downsides? Well, the only one so far is possibly the 3 device download limit, although thinking more about this it should be enough with the addition of unlimited web streaming. Initially I thought about downloading to my home PC, but why bother when it's always connected? If any other down sides pop-up(?!!) I'll let you know.

Shame the downloads "to purchase and keep" are so damn expensive though.

ECommerce Done Bad.

I was recently sent an email from Nokia telling me they’d created an account for me at their Nokia Music site and credited it with £4, which works out at about 5 free tracks at the 79 pence each they charge. So I promptly flagged it for looking at later and forgot all about it.

It’s now a couple of weeks later and I decided to log into this account I never asked for to see what gems I could find, my ultimate goal being to find an old classic album and download the lot for my free £4.

After installing their odd software (which I wouldn’t normally do, but since I will be re-installing the operating system on this machine shortly I’m not too bothered), I managed to browse around their store, but to my disappointment no albums could be found for less than £7.99, and no individual tracks for less than 79 pence.

So basically, CDs which I could got into HMV and buy for £3 will cost me over twice as much, without the physical expense of a tangible product which I could (arguably) format shift onto MP3 anyway.

So I’ve decided to spend my £4, then never return unless they ever decide to give me more free credit, at which point I may repeat the process if I can be bothered. The design of the site itself is not intuitive and it took me just under 5 minutes to work out how to download the tracks I’d selected. If I’m confused, what’s Mr. Average Joe going to do.

Sorry Nokia, but your store deserves to fail on both price and design.

And that brings me onto the second part of my rant – the greed of the music companies.

I used to have some sympathy for the record labels, after all they often spend large amounts of money promoting new groups, and don’t always get it back. But their business model for electronic delivery is just crazy.

When CDs came out we were told how they would be cheaper than Vinyl or cassette as the breakage rate would fall and they would become super cheap to manufacture. This did eventually happen, but only after the percentage ‘reserved’ by the publishers for these breakages was doubled from the previous formats, and only in recent times since imports via the web, and the demand for music has dropped has price followed suit.

Why has demand dropped? I’d guess that there’s just too much choice for other ways to spend our cash now, be that DVDs, video games, or any number of fancy gadgets that simply didn’t exist ten years ago.

I’m wrong of course, it’s actually down to all the pirates out there illegally downloading music for free from drug dealing gangs to make more money. Silly me.

I’d imagine any gang dealing in drugs that makes more money through distributing torrents for free is probably not that big a risk for the DEA. Of course, I understand there needs to be methods for money laundering used by these imaginary gangs, but I always assumed the point of these was using a legitimate business as a front, not another ‘criminal’ activity, after all, what would be gained? How silly I am…

So instead I’ll pay £7.99 for an electronic copy of an album I could get cheaper on CD anywhere else, or pay 79 pence for a single of one track, when I could have four or more tracks on a CD single for £2.

Except I won’t, I’m not that silly after all.