November 1, 2009 at 17:05Buy mp3 music in online stores
Good time of day.
I want to tell you about the experience of buying mp3 music through domestic online stores.
All of us have long been witnessing a war between major labels (which are represented by RIAA , IFPI , BPI , etc) and piracy (which are represented by warez portals, bittorrent trackers and most people :)). The main reason for the war is the inability to make super profits by selling a large number of disks of a popular artist.
In my opinion, the main reasons for the drop in disc sales are:
At the same time, warez sites / trackers provide truly unlimited opportunities for music lovers:
Why not make a portal with similar features just for selling music? I started looking for online mp3 stores in RuNet. I saw the announcement of one of the stores on a hub ( fidel.ru ). The second was found by me through a search engine ( soundkey.ru ).
It is worth noting that the search for a legal online mp3 store is not a trivial matter. Because there is no way to check the legality of the store. Illegal stores are not much different from legal stores. Take a look at recs.ru It’s an adequate website. Without annoying ads and popups. And if you still start the route to it and see www.riaa.ru [87.249.28.29] at the end of the road , then there is no doubt - a legal store! :) But this is not true. The site sells music that will be released on the "stage". But now is not about that.
We open. It seemed to me that the site is very heavy and overloaded. It loads for a long time, and an abundant flash is very difficult. We are trying to find something interesting for us to buy. Open the music section. We see filters by popularity, date, artist and album. But there is no way to choose the releases of a particular label, which I consider a significant minus. For the purchase, I chose "the largest prime number."
We replenish the account. Pleased with a large selection of recharge options. Here you have VISA / MasterCard, and SMS, and WebMoney, and Yandex.Money, and Sberbank. In general, full stuffing. I was chosen to replenish the account with the help of a VISA card, as I had one (Euro VISA Virtuon, which is not issued in plastic and was opened by me specifically for connecting to a paypad and making payments on the Internet). With a visa, there is a choice of two payment systems: payment.ru and Assist. The payment was made and, which I was very pleased with, the money came to my account in the store within minutes.
I paid for my order, "The Biggest Prime Number - The Biggest Simple Number 2007." A link appeared in the download section of the office. You can download only the entire album immediately packed in zip. In principle, I do not see this as a flaw. Download, unpack. We open and see that the seller did not even bother to put down tags.
I find this unacceptable for paid content. In general, the impression of the store begins to deteriorate. And here I, as a fan of my favorite band, notice that one track is missing. Really. It is not listed on the site, and it is not in my downloaded archive. At the same time, this track (Istanbul) is indicated on ozone in the disc information http://www.ozon.ru/context/detail/id/3325844/ , it can also be found in rips on warez portals and torrents, as well as in another mp3 the storehttp://soundkey.ru/album/1468/ . Where did one track go is a mystery to me. It should be noted that I bought an album of another group, in which there were all the tracks and tags.
Of the advantages of the store, it is worth noting the quick crediting of money to the account. Also, as I understand it, if something happens to my hard and I lose files, I will be able to download the purchased releases in the future.
Cons: heavy flash-loaded design and inconvenient interface.
The store loads much faster than its competitor above. You can also filter albums by date, popularity. Choose genres. But, which was nice for me, you can choose a label and see only its releases present in the store. I found a recently released debut album of an interesting group. Added to cart. There are also many different ways to fund your account. I chose VISA. The payment transaction seemed strange to me. First, I go to the site softkey.ru, through which I buy a recharge account soundkey, and from there I pay for this service through a cyber payment system. I was disappointed that the money had gone, unlike the fidel, already a day later. What’s the principle stated "Soundkey account replenishment Delivery time - from 1 day to 1 day." Not critical, but still. You can download the purchased album within five days after purchase. Moreover, Unlike the fidel, you can only download by track. An entire packaged album cannot be downloaded. I would not say that this is a flaw, I’ll just clarify. I started downloading the long-awaited album. After listening to several topics, I noticed that they did not end with a logical end, but were interrupted somewhere in the middle, and one topic was generally ten seconds long instead of a few minutes. Hmm ... I thought. Re-downloading by different managers and browsers yielded nothing. Climbing on an Internet, I found a list of tracks with playing time. On the album page in the store, truncated playing times were indicated. Without thinking twice, I sent a letter to support, where I explained everything in detail. The answer came in a day, that there is a problem and will solve it in the near future. A day later, a letter came that everything was fixed. And the long-awaited album has been downloaded. Three days to buy an album in an online store is harsh. :) But the frustrations did not end. With tags it was even worse than fidel:
A depressing sight. It is worth noting that I bought two more releases. In one of the albums (he is also 2009go) with tags there was the same problem. In another (2007th year) with tags everything was fine. But one of the tracks was compressed encoder, different from the others. Why and why remains a mystery to me:
Pluses of the store: a simpler and easier interface, the ability to view releases by label, domestic content is subjectively better represented.
Cons: subjectively sophisticated payment through softkey through cyber payment; 24-hour money transfer and 24-hour support response.
I want to summarize my purchases. It seems to me that the scope of sales of mp3 is in some incomprehensible suspended animation. The variety of content presentation is simply amazing - different codecs (even within the same album), crooked tags, albums with missing and incomplete tracks. I suspect that the problem of low-quality content does not hang on the stores, but directly on the labels that provide the content. But here I am not sure. One thing I can say for sure - I don’t want to pay money for such a quality product.
I also could not find a decent Ukrainian mp3 store. And with Russian is not easy. It is quite problematic to distinguish a legal store from an illegal one. And I'm a tech savvy person. When we buy discs in the store, we see good printing, holograms. They give us a check. We see what we buy and from whom. When we buy mp3, we don’t have the means to check the legality of the store. Perhaps labels or their associated organizations should issue a certificate to stores or maintain a database of stores available on label websites.
The pirated portal recs.ru earns (read steals) a lot of money, and its owner basks in Sydney. And the labels continue to cry that there are no sales and no one is buying anything.
I want to tell you about the experience of buying mp3 music through domestic online stores.
All of us have long been witnessing a war between major labels (which are represented by RIAA , IFPI , BPI , etc) and piracy (which are represented by warez portals, bittorrent trackers and most people :)). The main reason for the war is the inability to make super profits by selling a large number of disks of a popular artist.
In my opinion, the main reasons for the drop in disc sales are:
- it’s easier to download from the Internet than to go to the store for a disc;
- consultants in stores sometimes are not very well versed in music;
- to find a disc of a slightly popular artist is almost impossible to sell;
- it is also impossible to find a disc of a foreign artist for sale that does not have a representative label in your country;
- your option ...
At the same time, warez sites / trackers provide truly unlimited opportunities for music lovers:
- a search that takes seconds;
- huge collections of records. starting from yesterday's album of mediocre pop group, ending with ultra-rare recordings;
- search for similar artists, recommendations in the comments;
- downloading an album in mp3 takes about 15 minutes on a modern connection.
Why not make a portal with similar features just for selling music? I started looking for online mp3 stores in RuNet. I saw the announcement of one of the stores on a hub ( fidel.ru ). The second was found by me through a search engine ( soundkey.ru ).
It is worth noting that the search for a legal online mp3 store is not a trivial matter. Because there is no way to check the legality of the store. Illegal stores are not much different from legal stores. Take a look at recs.ru It’s an adequate website. Without annoying ads and popups. And if you still start the route to it and see www.riaa.ru [87.249.28.29] at the end of the road , then there is no doubt - a legal store! :) But this is not true. The site sells music that will be released on the "stage". But now is not about that.
So 1st store - fidel.ru
We open. It seemed to me that the site is very heavy and overloaded. It loads for a long time, and an abundant flash is very difficult. We are trying to find something interesting for us to buy. Open the music section. We see filters by popularity, date, artist and album. But there is no way to choose the releases of a particular label, which I consider a significant minus. For the purchase, I chose "the largest prime number."
We replenish the account. Pleased with a large selection of recharge options. Here you have VISA / MasterCard, and SMS, and WebMoney, and Yandex.Money, and Sberbank. In general, full stuffing. I was chosen to replenish the account with the help of a VISA card, as I had one (Euro VISA Virtuon, which is not issued in plastic and was opened by me specifically for connecting to a paypad and making payments on the Internet). With a visa, there is a choice of two payment systems: payment.ru and Assist. The payment was made and, which I was very pleased with, the money came to my account in the store within minutes.
I paid for my order, "The Biggest Prime Number - The Biggest Simple Number 2007." A link appeared in the download section of the office. You can download only the entire album immediately packed in zip. In principle, I do not see this as a flaw. Download, unpack. We open and see that the seller did not even bother to put down tags.
I find this unacceptable for paid content. In general, the impression of the store begins to deteriorate. And here I, as a fan of my favorite band, notice that one track is missing. Really. It is not listed on the site, and it is not in my downloaded archive. At the same time, this track (Istanbul) is indicated on ozone in the disc information http://www.ozon.ru/context/detail/id/3325844/ , it can also be found in rips on warez portals and torrents, as well as in another mp3 the storehttp://soundkey.ru/album/1468/ . Where did one track go is a mystery to me. It should be noted that I bought an album of another group, in which there were all the tracks and tags.
Of the advantages of the store, it is worth noting the quick crediting of money to the account. Also, as I understand it, if something happens to my hard and I lose files, I will be able to download the purchased releases in the future.
Cons: heavy flash-loaded design and inconvenient interface.
2nd store - soundkey.ru
The store loads much faster than its competitor above. You can also filter albums by date, popularity. Choose genres. But, which was nice for me, you can choose a label and see only its releases present in the store. I found a recently released debut album of an interesting group. Added to cart. There are also many different ways to fund your account. I chose VISA. The payment transaction seemed strange to me. First, I go to the site softkey.ru, through which I buy a recharge account soundkey, and from there I pay for this service through a cyber payment system. I was disappointed that the money had gone, unlike the fidel, already a day later. What’s the principle stated "Soundkey account replenishment Delivery time - from 1 day to 1 day." Not critical, but still. You can download the purchased album within five days after purchase. Moreover, Unlike the fidel, you can only download by track. An entire packaged album cannot be downloaded. I would not say that this is a flaw, I’ll just clarify. I started downloading the long-awaited album. After listening to several topics, I noticed that they did not end with a logical end, but were interrupted somewhere in the middle, and one topic was generally ten seconds long instead of a few minutes. Hmm ... I thought. Re-downloading by different managers and browsers yielded nothing. Climbing on an Internet, I found a list of tracks with playing time. On the album page in the store, truncated playing times were indicated. Without thinking twice, I sent a letter to support, where I explained everything in detail. The answer came in a day, that there is a problem and will solve it in the near future. A day later, a letter came that everything was fixed. And the long-awaited album has been downloaded. Three days to buy an album in an online store is harsh. :) But the frustrations did not end. With tags it was even worse than fidel:
A depressing sight. It is worth noting that I bought two more releases. In one of the albums (he is also 2009go) with tags there was the same problem. In another (2007th year) with tags everything was fine. But one of the tracks was compressed encoder, different from the others. Why and why remains a mystery to me:
Pluses of the store: a simpler and easier interface, the ability to view releases by label, domestic content is subjectively better represented.
Cons: subjectively sophisticated payment through softkey through cyber payment; 24-hour money transfer and 24-hour support response.
Conclusions.
I want to summarize my purchases. It seems to me that the scope of sales of mp3 is in some incomprehensible suspended animation. The variety of content presentation is simply amazing - different codecs (even within the same album), crooked tags, albums with missing and incomplete tracks. I suspect that the problem of low-quality content does not hang on the stores, but directly on the labels that provide the content. But here I am not sure. One thing I can say for sure - I don’t want to pay money for such a quality product.
I also could not find a decent Ukrainian mp3 store. And with Russian is not easy. It is quite problematic to distinguish a legal store from an illegal one. And I'm a tech savvy person. When we buy discs in the store, we see good printing, holograms. They give us a check. We see what we buy and from whom. When we buy mp3, we don’t have the means to check the legality of the store. Perhaps labels or their associated organizations should issue a certificate to stores or maintain a database of stores available on label websites.
The pirated portal recs.ru earns (read steals) a lot of money, and its owner basks in Sydney. And the labels continue to cry that there are no sales and no one is buying anything.