the user experience of HearMusic.com
If you ever find yourself in my flat, you'll fast learn that I'm a music junkie. In college, I was a DJ, which is when my CD-buying habit went from buying a CD or two occasionally to emptying out my wallet at the local music shop. To this day, I really shouldn't be allowed unattended in a music shop. Used music shops are even worse: I can happily spend hours in a used music shop poring over the racks. Some women buy shoes, I buy CDs.
What will get me to whip out my wallet faster than you can say 'should you really be doing that?' these days are radio station compilation discs. Local radio stations across the US (and around the world) have artists come into their studios to perform a song or two, and they regularly release compilations from these performances. KFOG, a local station here in the Bay Area, is one of the granddaddies of this, but there are many others. It used to be that getting them was hard. I had a network of friends around the world who would help me get them. I'd trade my local radio station discs for theirs. I'm pretty sure that I single-handedly ensured that Atlanta radio station 99X sold out of the third volume of their Live X disc, and I got lots of great discs in return.
These days, I don't need to do such frantic networking to get these CDs. Many radio stations, including the Bay Area's own Alice, are selling their exclusive radio CDs through Starbucks. Those discs are available on the Hear Music website. I headed there today, credit card in hand, ready to snap them up.
Except that was the hardest money that I've spent in a long time. I am an interested consumer who is just waiting, practically begging, to buy their music. Browsing their collection is a painful process. You have to move your mouse to the edges of the browsing area to move anywhere, and wait for the thumbnails of the covers to slooooowly scroll. If you can't tell what an album is based on the cover, you have to mouse over the cover to see the title and artist. They have some subsections, but they're not perfect. Not all of their compilations are in the 'Compilations' section, for example. And the site doesn't work very well in Safari.
The opportunity that they're really missing is to show me their Starbucks-exclusive content. Starbucks has been inking a lot of deals lately for exclusive music: Dave Matthews Band, Bob Dylan, Alanis Morissette. Why doesn't the website tell me about these exclusive discs? That should be a subsection. I can go in there to find the disc that their advertising says is an exclusive to Starbucks (but was sold out when I went into my local Starbucks this morning), and then I find myself in a whole section of other exclusive music too. My credit card will say 'use me', my CD collection at home will say 'we're lonely and need new friends', and my boyfriend will just sigh in resignation.
I was so annoyed at the experience that I ended up looking on eBay for some of them. I did find a couple of them elsewhere, and they were cheaper, so I jumped on them. If the Starbucks experience were easier, I wouldn't've bothered looking. I did buy some CDs from them, but they could have had a larger sale if it weren't for their bad user experience.
Comments
Anonymous
October 05, 2007
I highly recommend this series: http://www.amazon.com/KCRW-Rare-On-Air-(Series)/artist/B000AQ8VFUAnonymous
October 05, 2007
The comment has been removedAnonymous
October 09, 2007
If you have any series by KCRW then you know how electic their music programming is. What you won't know unless you listen to them live or streamed is that they are just beginning the process of digitizing their entire music library. There is a change that this might mean a flood of disks - both CD and vinyl - in the local record stores some month soon. I'm not saying that <b>will</b> be the case, just hoping that it might be. (And if it is, then for music aficionados like Nadyne it would be a huge reason to fly down.)Anonymous
October 09, 2007
Hmmm, I haven't been to LA recently. Hmmm ...