SERIOUS VIBES.

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a new music blog // sam@seriousvibes.co.uk

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An interesting point raised by yvynyl!

“Last night I downloaded TEN albums in a row from my backlog of TEN unique labels’ complimentary vinyl download code cards sites. Granted, one of the huge reasons I buy vinyl so readily these days is because of said cards, or rather what they get me. Why buy 1’s and 0’s of something for $10 when you can buy it for $15 and get the actual wax and the MP3s? The innovation certainly sparked my obsession and contributed exponentially to my collection. But, holy whoa the process is a huge fucking pain in the ass.

First of all, the user experience from one site to the other is wildly different, like no one bothered to chat at a conference somewhere about potential best practices. Some make you enter your email, read and type a 20 (that’s right, 20!) digit, random, case-sensitive, 8-point-font, randomly generated character string. Others make you sign up for a user account, confirm your email, go out and get said confirmation email, come back to the site to try and dig up the now-lost download link that you initially started off to nab.  All of them make you type in a far longer-than-necessary URL just to get to the ‘secret’ download page.  

‘Guilty’ parties here: Matador | Sup Pop | Sacred Bones | Mexican Summer | Domino | Jagjaguwar | 4AD | Arts & Crafts | Merge | Gold Robot (via DropCards)

I wish everyone could just get on the same page with a simple protocol.  Maybe get together and form a universal service that had a UX like, say, Bandcamp.  Or shoot, simply get hip to URL shorteners, or put QR codes on the damn slip of paper.

And while I’m the subject - from a pure basic web marketing standpoint - shouldn’t they be up-selling you during the process instead of simply trying to harvest your email for future spam? “Hi Mark, Welcome back! Since I see you just bought the new Washed Out record on vinyl, why not check out this new 7” from our similar roster artist {new band} that came out last week? {link} Oh, and we’d love it if you told your friends how much you loved this record! {tweet this}”  

Hell, they could elegantly integrate this whole process into actual brick-and-mortar record stores in a point-of-sale system that queues up yr downloads for you like magic so you can download the lot of them when you got to yr landlinecomputer, or zap them into your smartphone just then and there, or automatically add the record to yr Spotify slash Rdio slash iTunesMatch account, or build you a custom Pandora station for when you get back online…  

God, they’d have you buying three times as much as you intentionally went in to get in the first place.

Lastly, since I’ve always known this process/technology won’t last, so I’ve saved every single download card I’ve ever gotten. In ten, twenty years time when 99.9% of people have thrown them into the recycle bin, I’ll bust ‘em out and hang ‘em in a gallery.  Hah. Joke. Or, maybe that’s not such a bad idea… ” - yvynyl.

Post Info
Posted on Friday 9 March 2012.
1 year ago.
Filed under:
Notes: 77
  1. seriousvibes reblogged this from yvynyl and added:
    “Last night I downloaded TEN albums in a row
  2. scothenderson reblogged this from yvynyl
  3. allvelvetmornings reblogged this from yvynyl and added:
    File under: useless things with bad usability.
  4. itsmematt reblogged this from yvynyl and added:
    So many great points...have often wondered why...digital...
  5. silver-lined-city reblogged this from yvynyl and added:
    This, exactly, almost EVERY time
  6. sandstep reblogged this from yvynyl and added:
    Its like the record companies aren’t even trying to steal our money anymore. I can’t believe the price of a CD and a...
  7. daytracker said: hahahha wow that is a pain in the ass! usually I won’t download, I’ll just convert them. but then I never have enough space on my desktop, so I end up moving them…and then…okay yeah I guess nothing’s that efficient
  8. iwishiwasaginger reblogged this from yvynyl
  9. canabitchdream said: ur so lucky!
  10. beattheindiedrum reblogged this from yvynyl and added:
    cards work fine. They’re hella cheap after...so freebies! Vinyl manufacturers are charging...
  11. sxt said: It’s awful. Poorly labeled tracks, unlabeled tracks, missing tracks, odd encodings (a recent download from a major band was delivered as uncompressed WAV files), etc. It’s the digital equivalent of each label trying to press their own vinyl, a mess.
  12. friendsrecords said: We use bandcamp for all of our download cards now. Super simple process for the user, and they are cheap to buy. Also, you can print them to sticker paper and apply them to a much nicer looking card, like we do :)
  13. thecounterculture said: QR codes are the devil! Worse than long URLs, otherwise yes i agree.