I'm in my second year of membership at eMusic now which says something in itself. That I've taken this long to get around to reviewing it says something else: considering how long it has been ahead of the curve, eMusic has definitely gotten short shrift in the dialog about the quest for DRM-free digital downloads. It's been at it more than a decade and has served into 9 figures of downloads from its catalog, which is in the vicinity of 5 million songs.
There are two obvious issues with eMusic. The first is that it is subscription only. There are no a la carte downloads: you have to sign up for a subscription plan that charges a fixed amount in exchange for a certain number of song downloads per month. While eMusic guarantees you can cancel your subscription at any time and attempts to lower this barrier to entry by offering a generous no-cost, no-obligation trial preview (which allows you to keep the trial songs you download whether or not you sign on for the paid service) many will find this requirement an obstacle. It certainly kept me away for a long time.
The second and arguably more significant drawback is that eMusic carries non-major-label music exclusively. Major label artists are represented here and there when their early career material was recorded on independent labels. But you will find no Madonna, no Beatles, no ABBA or Led Zeppelin here (considering this, it is an irony of eMusic's history that for a time it was owned by prime clinger to DRM and general customer abuser Universal).
The first question to answer then about whether an eMusic membership is right for your music budget is whether the indie label catalog is valuable to you. There's no question that eMusic's catalog is deep. There are tens of thousands of tiny labels represented, including heavy hitters like Merge, Matador, Drag City, Kill Rock Stars and Thrill Jockey, and eMusic has relationships as well with distribution giants The Orchard and CD Baby, among others. Noticeably missing is Sub Pop, who I believe inked a deal with Rhapsody. I wish I could speak intelligently to eMusic's Jazz and Classical catalogs, but here my knowledge falters. But for indie rock and alternative there's really no shortage of music available for years of subscriptions.
And there's no denying that the compensation for the membership requirement is good value, with the per-track prices for monthly subscriptions from 25 to 60 cents, depending on the plan chosen: additional discounts come if you prepay your account in advance: at the top level (75 songs per month) paid 2 years in advance, per track costs are as low as 20 cents. Even the lowest obligation (10 tracks paid monthly) beat iTunes and Amazon at 60 cents per track.
Downloads require installing a download tool and (unless there is some clever widget out there I haven't figured out) must be manually uploaded to your music player's catalog. I'm probably pushing a thousand song downloads and only once had a technical problem. The browsing and searching interfaces are pretty effective: I've in particular had better than average luck with their "Artists Like This" feature that suggests similar artists to what you're searching for - including artists similar to artists (like major label properties) that eMusic doesn't carry. I've found a number of new things following these suggestions. Another feature that can deliver a lot of value is information from other members. Viewing the playlists, reviews and so on from other members can lead to lots of similar tastes (it's good to remember, though, that these things are publicly viewable, so you might want to delete that "songs to seduce my best friend's girl with" playlist).
On to the downsides. eMusic definitely bears the marks of being built on older, legacy interfaces. Until recently, for instance, music previews came in the form of clunky streaming file downloads that caused me persistent problems in iTunes. They have finally come around to in-browser previews (via Flash, I assume) - but they persist in the all-too-common paranoia of offering abbreviated partial previews only. As I've mentioned before, I think the failure of digital sellers to give full-length previews represents a short-sighted approach that ignores the retail legacy of free listening. But they are certainly in good company there. And still, while it is not as slick as a fresh-minted start-up might be, the interface does continue to adapt and improve.
I think eMusic focuses on getting potential customers to sign up for their free previews to a fault: as a non-member it's fairly difficult to, for example, get to the point where you can browse their catalog or look over the subscription plans (the FAQ on subscription plans, for example, is out of date and leaves out many options such as the prepay discounts mentioned above). They don't go so far as to actually prevent non-members from viewing this information, they just don't make it easy. Again, it's a policy I think is shortsighted. Even signing up for a free preview is a certain amount of hassle, and I for one want to know a bit more about what I'm getting before I start handing out my personal data.
Once you are a member, it's important to keep in mind that unused downloads don't roll over: it's use them or lose them. Amplifying this problem is the fact that downloads are not strictly monthly: they reset every 30 days. So rather than knowing your downloads will reset on the 20th of every month or whatever, you have to keep track of when the deadline date is. While technically you get more downloads per month this way than if they reset each month on a particular date, I've lost a few month's downloads when I was too busy to keep track of my subscription. This is a situation that clearly factors in eMusic's favor - they could, after all, easily send an alert email when your downloads are about to reset. I've been told, however, that they do distribute revenue from unused downloads to their member artists rather than simply keeping it for themselves.
Although I have no experience with it, it has to be noted that there have been persistent complaints of eMusic failing to process subscription cancellations and continuing to charge customers after cancellation has been requested. Whether this is actually common or widespread, and whether it has gotten better or not over time, I don't know.
I consider these minor gripes. For the indie music fan eMusic gets solid props. I've gotten a steady supply of new music and indie classics for nearing 2 years and I suspect I'll be keeping my subscription up for years to come, indefinitely if the deal stays solid and new artists keep signing up. I hope to someday rectify some of my jazz and classical deficiencies through them as well. It's worth mentioning, though not strictly relevant here, that they also offer subscription plans for DRM-free audiobooks. eMusic deserves more recognition as a pioneer and being for most intents and purposes the best deal in digital music downloads. Keep up the good work, eMusic!.
See previous reviews and submit sites for review at that Index Page
Showing posts with label review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label review. Show all posts
Monday, October 13, 2008
Friday, October 03, 2008
Rhapsody MP3 Store: oasis in the desert of the real?
Rhapsody.com was on the no-fly list until recently: they were every kind of wrong for Phree Musique: subscription, DRM format only, tied to the hated Real Player - but I’d read they had recently joined the growing ranks of those tapped to skunk iTunes yet again with a la carte, major label MP3 downloads on sale for more or less the going rate. Even so, I probably would have let my ongoing spite for Real keep them on the bottom of the check-out list, except for one thing: when I’d gone by to casually cruise the interface I’d noted they were giving a good deal on Led Zeppelin: Complete.
Zeppelin being one of my format problem bands: this set is mostly selections from my (recently-released-to-secondary-retail) tape collection, but Zep along with a handful of others I still own on that most persistent of formats, vinyl. I did some experiments transferring LPs to digital which were conclusive: it was a pain in the ass.
Other thirty-something’s Led Zeppelin nostalgia couldn’t be duller, right? So suffice to say that it is music that has earned a permanent spot on my emotional playlist and provided the soundtrack on a fair cross-section of teenage angst and joy. I figured I’d buy it again someday.
Still, I dithered over the purchase. I’ve yet to pay this much for a single purely digital item. The Box Set: the usual deal is you save on volume, but the physical package generally sweetens the deal with bonus material: booklets, photos, packaging, lyrics. My experience with the digital music market suggested that I’d get bupkus but the song files out of this deal. I’m not a fanatic: the bonus audio, the live versions and rare studio out takes didn’t hold much appeal.
Still, the deal was solid: the same package on Amazon was almost 40 dollars more. Maybe I’d be better off cherry picking the main albums? No help there: I wanted pretty much the canon: I through IV, Houses of the Holy and Physical Graffiti, and yes, Presence, In Through the Out Door and Coda, and the live stuff off of The Song Remains the Same at least. Over a hundred dollars worth of even the cheapest digital downloads, more than even the Complete Set download at Amazon. It’s a good deal. Really, when was the last time I read any of the printed material from a CD (there’s that slippery slope into digital ephemera again)?
I went for it. Browsing and building a shopping cart on Rhapsody can be done without a sign in, checkout requires setting up an account. Oops, it turns out I already signed up at some point back: looks like I’ve been resisting this purchase longer than I realized. Sign in, a standard credit card checkout, download initiated. A straight zip download: the lack of a proprietary download tool is a welcome feature.
I’ve been observing with interest the fact that digital music comes with a maintenance cost that CDs lack for being their own physical archive: I download, start loading it up into my iTunes library, but then burn the zip file to DVD: protect the data. All is ephemeral but you do what you can. And then, If I want to listen to it in the car I need to burn CDs. The blank discs, of course, are on my tab. Media and time: one is cheap but the other is ever more dear. But it takes me more than a minute to work off 60 bucks so I do my diligence and back up.
Rhapsody almost got shrugs teetering on the edge of props, because one nice deal doesn’t overcome that same old same old two point oh dietetic candy lozenge graphic design that makes browsing at their store a big ol’ yawn, the same old computer-generated link puke front page, the same boring categories, flavor of the month favorites, and blah blah blah you just paid 60 smacks for seventeen cents worth of bandwidth. And intellectual property, of course, which with luck and a little management I could own forever...
But in a little postmortem browsing later I discovered that on a fair cross-section of their material (not including Led Zeppelin, which is why I missed the feature the first time, and defined, one presumes, by the dictates of the content owners) Rhapsody is providing free, full preview without being signed in - in other words, you can just browse right in and stream full songs while you shop (albeit in an annoying pop-up window). Free listening, once an absolute staple of the record store experience just makes sense and its general absence in the current digital retail sphere is basically absurd. You nudged yourself into props, Rhapsody... just barely, so don’t get too comfortable.
P. S., why yes, they did indeed include metacontent with my “Complete” Led Zeppelin, in the form of one (1) jpeg of the collection’s utterly dull cover (the ZOSO symbols white on a black field), of the grainy persuasion, matchbook sized for mobile display. Probably could have included a 40 page pdf that someone probably already has lying around for about two tenths of a cent but grumble grumble grumble.
See previous reviews and submit sites for review at that Index Page
Zeppelin being one of my format problem bands: this set is mostly selections from my (recently-released-to-secondary-retail) tape collection, but Zep along with a handful of others I still own on that most persistent of formats, vinyl. I did some experiments transferring LPs to digital which were conclusive: it was a pain in the ass.
Other thirty-something’s Led Zeppelin nostalgia couldn’t be duller, right? So suffice to say that it is music that has earned a permanent spot on my emotional playlist and provided the soundtrack on a fair cross-section of teenage angst and joy. I figured I’d buy it again someday.
Still, I dithered over the purchase. I’ve yet to pay this much for a single purely digital item. The Box Set: the usual deal is you save on volume, but the physical package generally sweetens the deal with bonus material: booklets, photos, packaging, lyrics. My experience with the digital music market suggested that I’d get bupkus but the song files out of this deal. I’m not a fanatic: the bonus audio, the live versions and rare studio out takes didn’t hold much appeal.
Still, the deal was solid: the same package on Amazon was almost 40 dollars more. Maybe I’d be better off cherry picking the main albums? No help there: I wanted pretty much the canon: I through IV, Houses of the Holy and Physical Graffiti, and yes, Presence, In Through the Out Door and Coda, and the live stuff off of The Song Remains the Same at least. Over a hundred dollars worth of even the cheapest digital downloads, more than even the Complete Set download at Amazon. It’s a good deal. Really, when was the last time I read any of the printed material from a CD (there’s that slippery slope into digital ephemera again)?
I went for it. Browsing and building a shopping cart on Rhapsody can be done without a sign in, checkout requires setting up an account. Oops, it turns out I already signed up at some point back: looks like I’ve been resisting this purchase longer than I realized. Sign in, a standard credit card checkout, download initiated. A straight zip download: the lack of a proprietary download tool is a welcome feature.
I’ve been observing with interest the fact that digital music comes with a maintenance cost that CDs lack for being their own physical archive: I download, start loading it up into my iTunes library, but then burn the zip file to DVD: protect the data. All is ephemeral but you do what you can. And then, If I want to listen to it in the car I need to burn CDs. The blank discs, of course, are on my tab. Media and time: one is cheap but the other is ever more dear. But it takes me more than a minute to work off 60 bucks so I do my diligence and back up.
Rhapsody almost got shrugs teetering on the edge of props, because one nice deal doesn’t overcome that same old same old two point oh dietetic candy lozenge graphic design that makes browsing at their store a big ol’ yawn, the same old computer-generated link puke front page, the same boring categories, flavor of the month favorites, and blah blah blah you just paid 60 smacks for seventeen cents worth of bandwidth. And intellectual property, of course, which with luck and a little management I could own forever...
But in a little postmortem browsing later I discovered that on a fair cross-section of their material (not including Led Zeppelin, which is why I missed the feature the first time, and defined, one presumes, by the dictates of the content owners) Rhapsody is providing free, full preview without being signed in - in other words, you can just browse right in and stream full songs while you shop (albeit in an annoying pop-up window). Free listening, once an absolute staple of the record store experience just makes sense and its general absence in the current digital retail sphere is basically absurd. You nudged yourself into props, Rhapsody... just barely, so don’t get too comfortable.
P. S., why yes, they did indeed include metacontent with my “Complete” Led Zeppelin, in the form of one (1) jpeg of the collection’s utterly dull cover (the ZOSO symbols white on a black field), of the grainy persuasion, matchbook sized for mobile display. Probably could have included a 40 page pdf that someone probably already has lying around for about two tenths of a cent but grumble grumble grumble.
See previous reviews and submit sites for review at that Index Page
Saturday, April 12, 2008
iYiYi: shopping in music's Mall of America
Now, I'm not going to waste more than half a sentence rehashing the discussion of whether Apple Computer's "indie cred" is counterfeit, other than to say, sometimes you've got to face facts: when you're the biggest in the U.S., you are not the scrappy underdog. The iTunes Music Store got there first (it didn't, of course, but in all practical respects it did), did it right (relatively speaking) and is reaping its reward.
I resisted the pull of the iTMS for a long time, on principle, mind you, because of the DRM. My relenting on this point was not a principled one. One day I found myself wanting to hear the full length rendition of "The Journey of the Sorcerer," the Eagles' oddball banjo-delic instrumental that has served as the theme song for the dramatization of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in various incarnations. A few years later I may have been able to hear it legally without paying for it through one of the various new social discovery experiments: as it was I succumbed to the lure of immediacy and took my DRM.
And for a while its general transparency seemed fine and once in a while I'd get music off iTunes, until a few everyday hassles reminded me that these weren't ordinary MP3s and that as a result I would have to manage them as long as I retained them. I can't say it was enough to compel me to expunge them from my collection, but it irked me enough that I elected to generally skip the iTMS as a music source.
I was excited when the news of the Music Store's "Plus" collection appeared, the first big breach in the amazingly resistant frontier of DRM-free major label digital downloads. Also I had a gift card. I ordered Dark Side of the Moon right up, firmly sorting me into some sort of approaching-middle-age-dude box, I suspect, and that went just fine. A couple of my former purchases had moved to the Plus collection, available to be unlocked for a small fee. Fair enough, or at least better than nothing, right? Steve Jobs was publicly exhorting the record industry to let his downloads go and it was all very salutary.
Nevertheless it had been a while since, the other day, I decided that I needed a refresher course in the iTMS shopping experience. No, that's a lie. Somewhere along in there I developed a distinct chip on my shoulder about the whole iTMS experience and I set out on my shopping endeavor, purely as fodder for this blog, with a bitter heart. Maybe it was the Amazon thing. Letting Amazon scoop them on a general DRM-free major label catalog continues to strike me as a major business failure. Bending that uniform pricing model to charge more for Plus tracks. Amazon debunking the whole premise of the value of uniform pricing in the first place.
So I fired up iTunes with the intent of buying the first Plus item I saw, for the unvarnished experience, sort of like wandering into Walmart. What I got was...
Well, before I get into that, can I just talk about the virtual retail space? I mean, that is a blog in itself, but these music sites. Why are there so many examples of this: front pages that seem to suggest that God gave them a single sheet of foolscap and a divine injunction to stuff everything they could on it. Here is some of what's occupying real estate in the Music Store's foyer: NEW RELEASES. JUST FOR YOU. WHAT'S HOT. STAFF FAVORITES. FREE. INDIES. Something called QUICK LINKS with links to things like Buy iTunes Gifts on it. A music store menu that ought to be called Quick Links but bears the imaginative title iTunes STORE. OH I THOUGHT I WAS ALREADY IN THE STORE. WHY ARE WE SHOUTING? TOP SO - ahem, Top Songs. Top Rentals. Top TV Episodes and Albums and Ringtones and Music Videos and Podcasts and Audiobooks... all bracketed by clusters of standalone buttons with everything from American Idol promotions to books by Oprah to Ellen Degeneres for what reason I do not know except it has SOMETHING TO DO WITH AMERICAN IDOL. I'm sorry, I'm shouting again. This was supposed to be a short review, I'm aiming for "snappier."
Here's the thing: the iTMS lives in my music player. It sleeps in the same folder as my entire music collection. Is this whole Apple aesthetic not supposed to be about the clean and simple interface? Why am I confronted with what can only be called a link vomit of (at best) postage stamp sized icons? And why is the first thing that this store which lives inside my music collection offers me Yellowcard?
Nothing against Yellowcard, okay, as I have sort of made fun of them a couple times now: I hope their multi-platinum record sales (and I'd never heard of them! So out of touch) will console them. My perusal of my $7.99 album purchase from iTMS Plus, Live from Las Vegas at the Palms, suggests they are generating well-polished punk pop, probably as we speak, much in the hardcore roots vein of Green Day, who I once saw opening for Bad Religion, if you can believe that, and if you want to know about MY indie cred. Anyway, my point is, this is not Yellowcard's bad. Signing some live exclusive deal with iTunes is not a decision I can fault any aspiring musician for.
Offering this to me, as my very first choice on the very first page I see when I enter your store, on the other hand: come one, Apple, I thought we had a relationship. Well you were wrong about that. Apple wants to see other people: LOTS of other people, and if this thing feels increasingly less personal, well, it is business. The point I'm making here is that if Apple has attained Walmart-like retail status as a music seller, no mean feat, it is also delivering a Walmart retail experience. The user interface is a cluttered mess, selections based on personal data are shallow and perfunctory, searching is mediocre, and the location of the store within my music-playing software is actually kind of a pain in the ass. The failure to negotiate equal access with Amazon to DRM free major label catalogs was a big fumble, the pricing is largely uncompetitive, the surcharge on music in the Plus catalog sucks, and frankly, I'll shop there again when everything is DRM free and they offer me free upconversion of all my previously purchased, FairPlay encumbered tracks, which I'll otherwise probably expunge next time a major migration of the catalog is required. Checkouts and downloads generally work fine, at least from inside iTunes on an iMac, the only way I've ever experienced it, but you know, checkout at Sam Goody was generally a pretty trouble free experience. I think the bar is set justifiably higher for Apple and I don't think they cleared it. Congratulations, iTunes Music Store, you are the first review to receive a rating of HATE, heralding in the age of a crueler, rougher Phree Musique digital music download store review blog! A "one thousand points of darkness" sort of digital music download store review blog! How's that? "Snappy" enough for you?
Update, January 2009: Given the recent transition to all DRM-Free tracks, I am upgrading the iTMS rating to Shrugs. Keep up the mediocre work, guys.
See previous reviews and submit sites for review at that Index Page
I resisted the pull of the iTMS for a long time, on principle, mind you, because of the DRM. My relenting on this point was not a principled one. One day I found myself wanting to hear the full length rendition of "The Journey of the Sorcerer," the Eagles' oddball banjo-delic instrumental that has served as the theme song for the dramatization of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in various incarnations. A few years later I may have been able to hear it legally without paying for it through one of the various new social discovery experiments: as it was I succumbed to the lure of immediacy and took my DRM.
And for a while its general transparency seemed fine and once in a while I'd get music off iTunes, until a few everyday hassles reminded me that these weren't ordinary MP3s and that as a result I would have to manage them as long as I retained them. I can't say it was enough to compel me to expunge them from my collection, but it irked me enough that I elected to generally skip the iTMS as a music source.
I was excited when the news of the Music Store's "Plus" collection appeared, the first big breach in the amazingly resistant frontier of DRM-free major label digital downloads. Also I had a gift card. I ordered Dark Side of the Moon right up, firmly sorting me into some sort of approaching-middle-age-dude box, I suspect, and that went just fine. A couple of my former purchases had moved to the Plus collection, available to be unlocked for a small fee. Fair enough, or at least better than nothing, right? Steve Jobs was publicly exhorting the record industry to let his downloads go and it was all very salutary.
Nevertheless it had been a while since, the other day, I decided that I needed a refresher course in the iTMS shopping experience. No, that's a lie. Somewhere along in there I developed a distinct chip on my shoulder about the whole iTMS experience and I set out on my shopping endeavor, purely as fodder for this blog, with a bitter heart. Maybe it was the Amazon thing. Letting Amazon scoop them on a general DRM-free major label catalog continues to strike me as a major business failure. Bending that uniform pricing model to charge more for Plus tracks. Amazon debunking the whole premise of the value of uniform pricing in the first place.
So I fired up iTunes with the intent of buying the first Plus item I saw, for the unvarnished experience, sort of like wandering into Walmart. What I got was...
Well, before I get into that, can I just talk about the virtual retail space? I mean, that is a blog in itself, but these music sites. Why are there so many examples of this: front pages that seem to suggest that God gave them a single sheet of foolscap and a divine injunction to stuff everything they could on it. Here is some of what's occupying real estate in the Music Store's foyer: NEW RELEASES. JUST FOR YOU. WHAT'S HOT. STAFF FAVORITES. FREE. INDIES. Something called QUICK LINKS with links to things like Buy iTunes Gifts on it. A music store menu that ought to be called Quick Links but bears the imaginative title iTunes STORE. OH I THOUGHT I WAS ALREADY IN THE STORE. WHY ARE WE SHOUTING? TOP SO - ahem, Top Songs. Top Rentals. Top TV Episodes and Albums and Ringtones and Music Videos and Podcasts and Audiobooks... all bracketed by clusters of standalone buttons with everything from American Idol promotions to books by Oprah to Ellen Degeneres for what reason I do not know except it has SOMETHING TO DO WITH AMERICAN IDOL. I'm sorry, I'm shouting again. This was supposed to be a short review, I'm aiming for "snappier."
Here's the thing: the iTMS lives in my music player. It sleeps in the same folder as my entire music collection. Is this whole Apple aesthetic not supposed to be about the clean and simple interface? Why am I confronted with what can only be called a link vomit of (at best) postage stamp sized icons? And why is the first thing that this store which lives inside my music collection offers me Yellowcard?
Nothing against Yellowcard, okay, as I have sort of made fun of them a couple times now: I hope their multi-platinum record sales (and I'd never heard of them! So out of touch) will console them. My perusal of my $7.99 album purchase from iTMS Plus, Live from Las Vegas at the Palms, suggests they are generating well-polished punk pop, probably as we speak, much in the hardcore roots vein of Green Day, who I once saw opening for Bad Religion, if you can believe that, and if you want to know about MY indie cred. Anyway, my point is, this is not Yellowcard's bad. Signing some live exclusive deal with iTunes is not a decision I can fault any aspiring musician for.
Offering this to me, as my very first choice on the very first page I see when I enter your store, on the other hand: come one, Apple, I thought we had a relationship. Well you were wrong about that. Apple wants to see other people: LOTS of other people, and if this thing feels increasingly less personal, well, it is business. The point I'm making here is that if Apple has attained Walmart-like retail status as a music seller, no mean feat, it is also delivering a Walmart retail experience. The user interface is a cluttered mess, selections based on personal data are shallow and perfunctory, searching is mediocre, and the location of the store within my music-playing software is actually kind of a pain in the ass. The failure to negotiate equal access with Amazon to DRM free major label catalogs was a big fumble, the pricing is largely uncompetitive, the surcharge on music in the Plus catalog sucks, and frankly, I'll shop there again when everything is DRM free and they offer me free upconversion of all my previously purchased, FairPlay encumbered tracks, which I'll otherwise probably expunge next time a major migration of the catalog is required. Checkouts and downloads generally work fine, at least from inside iTunes on an iMac, the only way I've ever experienced it, but you know, checkout at Sam Goody was generally a pretty trouble free experience. I think the bar is set justifiably higher for Apple and I don't think they cleared it. Congratulations, iTunes Music Store, you are the first review to receive a rating of HATE, heralding in the age of a crueler, rougher Phree Musique digital music download store review blog! A "one thousand points of darkness" sort of digital music download store review blog! How's that? "Snappy" enough for you?
Update, January 2009: Given the recent transition to all DRM-Free tracks, I am upgrading the iTMS rating to Shrugs. Keep up the mediocre work, guys.
See previous reviews and submit sites for review at that Index Page
Friday, November 30, 2007
Brad Does Not Suck: real indie at last.
Update: September 2008: Brad Sucks recently released a new CD, Out of It. Given the minor technical glitch I experienced with the sale in the review below, a note on my most recent retail experience: my pre-order sale went through without a hitch, I got a head's up email on release day that my downloads were enabled, and got the album with no problems. Everything I like about Brad Sucks has stayed just as good, though. This recent blog update gives details about how he's sticking with the "open source" mentality that characterized the first album release. And those dumb humps over at Pitchfork still never heard of him.
Original Review
Ottowa-based Brad Sucks has everything a person ought to need to be a mainstream success. Musically solid, catchy, lots of smartly-woven musical threads drawing on sources from dance to Detroit rock guitarsmanship to country. All delivering sharply written, economical lyrics sung in an appealing baritone (Brad informs me he thinks he's actually a low tenor) that's a perfect fit to the words. But of course I'm not reviewing music here, I'll have to leave that up to Pitchfork. Apparently nobody over at Pitchfork reads William Gibson's blog, though, as Brad Sucks is of this writing unknown there. In summary, new media or not, there's still a lot of holes in the net, and my opinion is not yet a significant factor in what "blows up."
Now I've known of Brad Sucks for a while, and in fact shared space on a compilation album I may have mentioned previously with him (he and I appearing as alter egos frenetic and nanojath respectively, lower case represent!), and I've been looking forward to listening to his full album, I Don't Know What I'm Doing, for a long time, but I had this idea rolling around in my brain that I was going to start the Phree Musique Blog again as a digital music store review site, so I squirreled away that link in a folder with lots of company and, you know, years passed.
Of course my unreliable writing strategy need not have interfered with my listening to all the music and then some, since Brad offers lower quality free downloads, full production files for the remix-minded (and plenty of the remixed for free as well). But this is one of the persistent downsides of the internet: out of sight, out of mind.
So after taking something like three years after deciding I wanted to own it to purchase the album I don't know how much I should complain that it took four or five days for my digital album to be available to download. It was my own fault for mindlessly agreeing to whatever PayPal defaulted to and electing to pay with an e-check, the banking industry's for its "shit don't happen weekends or holidays" policy (I ordered just before Thanksgiving), and it must be said a glitch in Brad's self-coded store that the download stayed hung up even after the e-check cleared (the open source store software is still another totally cool Brad service, though). I did eventually have to clear it up with an email, which was quickly and politely dealt with. Doubtless the kink is already worked out. I also don't doubt that an email at any point in the transaction would have gotten the files unlocked.
Other than that the store itself is simple with lots of options (OGG and FLAC files are available for you purists, along with the 192k MP3s for us philistines) and the commerce half is the standard PayPal experience. If I'd used a credit card (or trusted PayPal to hang on to more of my money) it would have been transparent commerce. My only other complaint is that I still think a buck a track is too steep, particularly for direct sale, and though the full album gets a price break it's the same cost as the physical CD (though you save shipping): I imagine this is a conscious choice and I suppose there's an argument for uniform pricing. I still crave a bargain when shopping digital files, and more than the "save on shipping" variety.
Still, the package when it arrived pretty much blew away the competition thus far: I've been complaining about the stinginess with the metadata in a context where delivering additional data is all but free: I was very pleased to see files for the full CD booklet (with lyrics) and even a circular formatted label if you're the sort of person who prints labels for your CD-Rs.
In short, I expect great things from Brad Sucks: definitely one to watch. I think in most respects he sets the bar higher for the pure digital commerce experience. Pitchfork take note.
See previous reviews and submit sites for review at that Index Page
Original Review
Ottowa-based Brad Sucks has everything a person ought to need to be a mainstream success. Musically solid, catchy, lots of smartly-woven musical threads drawing on sources from dance to Detroit rock guitarsmanship to country. All delivering sharply written, economical lyrics sung in an appealing baritone (Brad informs me he thinks he's actually a low tenor) that's a perfect fit to the words. But of course I'm not reviewing music here, I'll have to leave that up to Pitchfork. Apparently nobody over at Pitchfork reads William Gibson's blog, though, as Brad Sucks is of this writing unknown there. In summary, new media or not, there's still a lot of holes in the net, and my opinion is not yet a significant factor in what "blows up."
Now I've known of Brad Sucks for a while, and in fact shared space on a compilation album I may have mentioned previously with him (he and I appearing as alter egos frenetic and nanojath respectively, lower case represent!), and I've been looking forward to listening to his full album, I Don't Know What I'm Doing, for a long time, but I had this idea rolling around in my brain that I was going to start the Phree Musique Blog again as a digital music store review site, so I squirreled away that link in a folder with lots of company and, you know, years passed.
Of course my unreliable writing strategy need not have interfered with my listening to all the music and then some, since Brad offers lower quality free downloads, full production files for the remix-minded (and plenty of the remixed for free as well). But this is one of the persistent downsides of the internet: out of sight, out of mind.
So after taking something like three years after deciding I wanted to own it to purchase the album I don't know how much I should complain that it took four or five days for my digital album to be available to download. It was my own fault for mindlessly agreeing to whatever PayPal defaulted to and electing to pay with an e-check, the banking industry's for its "shit don't happen weekends or holidays" policy (I ordered just before Thanksgiving), and it must be said a glitch in Brad's self-coded store that the download stayed hung up even after the e-check cleared (the open source store software is still another totally cool Brad service, though). I did eventually have to clear it up with an email, which was quickly and politely dealt with. Doubtless the kink is already worked out. I also don't doubt that an email at any point in the transaction would have gotten the files unlocked.
Other than that the store itself is simple with lots of options (OGG and FLAC files are available for you purists, along with the 192k MP3s for us philistines) and the commerce half is the standard PayPal experience. If I'd used a credit card (or trusted PayPal to hang on to more of my money) it would have been transparent commerce. My only other complaint is that I still think a buck a track is too steep, particularly for direct sale, and though the full album gets a price break it's the same cost as the physical CD (though you save shipping): I imagine this is a conscious choice and I suppose there's an argument for uniform pricing. I still crave a bargain when shopping digital files, and more than the "save on shipping" variety.
Still, the package when it arrived pretty much blew away the competition thus far: I've been complaining about the stinginess with the metadata in a context where delivering additional data is all but free: I was very pleased to see files for the full CD booklet (with lyrics) and even a circular formatted label if you're the sort of person who prints labels for your CD-Rs.
In short, I expect great things from Brad Sucks: definitely one to watch. I think in most respects he sets the bar higher for the pure digital commerce experience. Pitchfork take note.
See previous reviews and submit sites for review at that Index Page
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Amazon.com: test driving the big Kahuna
I'm not a big fan of Amazon.com, to put it right out front, mainly because of their patent hijinx and "relaxed" attitudes towards privacy. In fact, I'm pretty sure I pompously "canceled my account" in an energetically written email inspired by some outrage de jour, several years back. Of course, they never flushed my data, as I discovered to little surprise when I came slinking back at some later date, snared in the unethical pincers of the lowest available price...
Indeed, I was moderately horrified upon signing in for the first time in quite a while to discover that my account (with credit card info preloaded and ready) was still hanging out there guarded only by my old, pre-paranoia, weakish password that I used to secure EVERYTHING with before some weird though inconclusive anomalies turned up on a credit card account and spooked me into converting anything identity-theftalicious over to strong, pain-in-the-ass long strings of gibberish passwords. Take that, NSA!
Anyway.
So despite my ambiguous relationship with the great flagship of ye olde internette bubble the first (another list in that long line of things I never thought I'd find myself doing: pining for the nineties), I found it very significant and exciting when Amazon announced the launch of its DRM-free MP3 download store. Let's not mince words: this is the first and at this point only competition to iTunes. I'm talking, of course, about the mainstream here, and I don't expect this bicameral hegemony to last long. Still, although my credentials as a capitalist are shaky, I believe in the value of competition to optimize transactional systems, and seeing this unfold in a nascent marketplace in real time definitely turns my crank. And honestly, I've been fairly impressed with what I've been seeing out of Amazon recently, as regards commoditization of data transaction, so I've been eager to check the new kid on the block out.
It would be real interesting to find out what sort of wrangling it took to get a serious chunk of the major labels' catalogs available without DRM. I have a sneaky suspicion that the prospect of sticking it to Apple, which seems to have a less than idyllic relationship with many of its content providers, had a place in this equation. But alas such questions are beyond the scope of my little review project. Perhaps someone will write a book someday. Let's get to the core commerce experience.
I'm proceeding on the assumption that Gentle Reader comes with previous experience with the Amazon shopping paradigm. Up to checkout shopping the online store is pretty identical. You're encouraged to grab a little download manager app, and indeed I believe it is mandatory to download full albums, but the process is conventional and painless (as long as you don't mind clicking "I agree" boxes without first doing a lot of tedious reading to find out which rights you're clicking away this time). I'd recommend installing it up front.
The MP3 Downloads Department front page is the same witlessly organized, overstuffed (six page-downs of scroll!) mess we've all come to know and love (amusingly led, in this case, by shameless exploitation of iPod iconography, universal symbol of the digital music). I'll freely admit I don't have ready alternatives for the apparently inescapable melange of useless genre category sidebars, "hot new picks," and row after row of brainless categories... featured artists (why look honey, Jay-Z is featured. Let's check that young man out), the spotlighted, the new, the hot, and in the basement, the inevitable blogged. I won't let my lack of solutions stop me from pointing out what a travesty this sort of virtual mall experience is on the downhill side of the 21st century, decade one. At least the search toolbar, the only thing on the page that's worth a damn, is at the top.
Search is, of course, rendering ever-widening swaths of data presentation obsolete, and to be honest I had to kind of force myself to notice what a junkyard the front page was. My inclination is to automatically ignore it and just start looking for what I want. Amazon's search is perfectly functional, I found what I was looking for first time out 3 tries in a row.
For purchasing, it appears Amazon has adopted the iTunes "pay as you go" system: there isn't a shopping cart feature for downloads: everything goes through 1-click (and you can stick your registered trademark up your @-hole, Amazon). While this isn't such a burden if you're buying albums, it's as stupid system for a la carte downloads on Amazon as it is on iTunes, maybe more so as Amazon already has the architecture of a shopping cart in place.
Beyond this, the downloads went mostly smoothly. They went into my iTunes library automatically, a welcome feature for a third party vendor. The album art showed up as well, though at this point I've got so many widgets and doodads managing musical metacontent that it's hard to tell if Amazon had anything to do with that.
I had one scare with my purchases. Some downloaded content stopped showing up in iTunes in the middle of the process, apparently as the result of my dicking around with unrelated iTunes files while the transfer was ongoing. When I saw the missing songs listed as complete in Amazon's download manager window I feared an interaction with customer support was in my future. I should say it's hard to say whether this error was Amazon's fault, something to do with iTunes, or the result of my overstuffed hard drive, which is causing my aging G4 iMac to gag over pretty much any kind of multitasking these days.
Whatever the case, a handy "Reveal in Finder" button on the download manager showed that only the transfer to the iTunes library had been arrested - the files were safely ensconced in a welcome new Amazon downloads folder in my iTunes music files. My buddies over at eMusic (I'll get to you, I'll get to you!) could take some lessons from Amazon's download management protocols. I called the missing tracks up from within iTunes and all was well.
The prices are pretty conventional, too high in my book, in other words - mostly $.99, occasionally $.89 a track. M.I.A. gave me a break for buying the whole album on Kala (yay), no such love from Steely Dan, however (boo). I bought three LPs and spent a little under $23, not terrible, but hopefully that competition factor will actually kick in at some point. Still, I ended up with well-organized albums of 256 kbps MP3s intelligently fed into my computers music filing system.
Bottom line: Amazon delivers an impressive catalog of DRM-free albums and tracks at market-fair but uninspiring prices. The browsing interface is typically clunky but the download manager is simple and helpful, and the mesh with iTunes virtually seamless. I have no reservations saying that Amazon has earned its place as an essential vendor for any serious consumer of digital downloads. Amazon, my grudging props to you.
See previous reviews and submit sites for review at that Index Page
Indeed, I was moderately horrified upon signing in for the first time in quite a while to discover that my account (with credit card info preloaded and ready) was still hanging out there guarded only by my old, pre-paranoia, weakish password that I used to secure EVERYTHING with before some weird though inconclusive anomalies turned up on a credit card account and spooked me into converting anything identity-theftalicious over to strong, pain-in-the-ass long strings of gibberish passwords. Take that, NSA!
Anyway.
So despite my ambiguous relationship with the great flagship of ye olde internette bubble the first (another list in that long line of things I never thought I'd find myself doing: pining for the nineties), I found it very significant and exciting when Amazon announced the launch of its DRM-free MP3 download store. Let's not mince words: this is the first and at this point only competition to iTunes. I'm talking, of course, about the mainstream here, and I don't expect this bicameral hegemony to last long. Still, although my credentials as a capitalist are shaky, I believe in the value of competition to optimize transactional systems, and seeing this unfold in a nascent marketplace in real time definitely turns my crank. And honestly, I've been fairly impressed with what I've been seeing out of Amazon recently, as regards commoditization of data transaction, so I've been eager to check the new kid on the block out.
It would be real interesting to find out what sort of wrangling it took to get a serious chunk of the major labels' catalogs available without DRM. I have a sneaky suspicion that the prospect of sticking it to Apple, which seems to have a less than idyllic relationship with many of its content providers, had a place in this equation. But alas such questions are beyond the scope of my little review project. Perhaps someone will write a book someday. Let's get to the core commerce experience.
I'm proceeding on the assumption that Gentle Reader comes with previous experience with the Amazon shopping paradigm. Up to checkout shopping the online store is pretty identical. You're encouraged to grab a little download manager app, and indeed I believe it is mandatory to download full albums, but the process is conventional and painless (as long as you don't mind clicking "I agree" boxes without first doing a lot of tedious reading to find out which rights you're clicking away this time). I'd recommend installing it up front.
The MP3 Downloads Department front page is the same witlessly organized, overstuffed (six page-downs of scroll!) mess we've all come to know and love (amusingly led, in this case, by shameless exploitation of iPod iconography, universal symbol of the digital music). I'll freely admit I don't have ready alternatives for the apparently inescapable melange of useless genre category sidebars, "hot new picks," and row after row of brainless categories... featured artists (why look honey, Jay-Z is featured. Let's check that young man out), the spotlighted, the new, the hot, and in the basement, the inevitable blogged. I won't let my lack of solutions stop me from pointing out what a travesty this sort of virtual mall experience is on the downhill side of the 21st century, decade one. At least the search toolbar, the only thing on the page that's worth a damn, is at the top.
Search is, of course, rendering ever-widening swaths of data presentation obsolete, and to be honest I had to kind of force myself to notice what a junkyard the front page was. My inclination is to automatically ignore it and just start looking for what I want. Amazon's search is perfectly functional, I found what I was looking for first time out 3 tries in a row.
For purchasing, it appears Amazon has adopted the iTunes "pay as you go" system: there isn't a shopping cart feature for downloads: everything goes through 1-click (and you can stick your registered trademark up your @-hole, Amazon). While this isn't such a burden if you're buying albums, it's as stupid system for a la carte downloads on Amazon as it is on iTunes, maybe more so as Amazon already has the architecture of a shopping cart in place.
Beyond this, the downloads went mostly smoothly. They went into my iTunes library automatically, a welcome feature for a third party vendor. The album art showed up as well, though at this point I've got so many widgets and doodads managing musical metacontent that it's hard to tell if Amazon had anything to do with that.
I had one scare with my purchases. Some downloaded content stopped showing up in iTunes in the middle of the process, apparently as the result of my dicking around with unrelated iTunes files while the transfer was ongoing. When I saw the missing songs listed as complete in Amazon's download manager window I feared an interaction with customer support was in my future. I should say it's hard to say whether this error was Amazon's fault, something to do with iTunes, or the result of my overstuffed hard drive, which is causing my aging G4 iMac to gag over pretty much any kind of multitasking these days.
Whatever the case, a handy "Reveal in Finder" button on the download manager showed that only the transfer to the iTunes library had been arrested - the files were safely ensconced in a welcome new Amazon downloads folder in my iTunes music files. My buddies over at eMusic (I'll get to you, I'll get to you!) could take some lessons from Amazon's download management protocols. I called the missing tracks up from within iTunes and all was well.
The prices are pretty conventional, too high in my book, in other words - mostly $.99, occasionally $.89 a track. M.I.A. gave me a break for buying the whole album on Kala (yay), no such love from Steely Dan, however (boo). I bought three LPs and spent a little under $23, not terrible, but hopefully that competition factor will actually kick in at some point. Still, I ended up with well-organized albums of 256 kbps MP3s intelligently fed into my computers music filing system.
Bottom line: Amazon delivers an impressive catalog of DRM-free albums and tracks at market-fair but uninspiring prices. The browsing interface is typically clunky but the download manager is simple and helpful, and the mesh with iTunes virtually seamless. I have no reservations saying that Amazon has earned its place as an essential vendor for any serious consumer of digital downloads. Amazon, my grudging props to you.
See previous reviews and submit sites for review at that Index Page
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Okay... Computer? Radiohead imitates some dude in a basement
As Radiohead's "historic" offer is now defunct and they show little interest in continuing as a download provider I'm decommissioning this review, so to speak. Read more here. I'm also downgrading my assessment to "shrugs" out of pure spite.
Of course I'm pushing two weeks behind the curve of the hype on the Radiohead "pay what you like" digital download of their latest album, In Rainbows.
And I'll admit: a part of me is a little annoyed by the degree of swooning, "this changes everything" coverage Radiohead's payment-optional experiment has received. I covered Jane Siberry doing this very thing in March of '06, and it was old news then (what Siberry calls "self-determined pricing" is still the standard at her site and it is still well worth checking out, incidentally). From "try it for free, buy if you feel it" presentations like Harvey Danger to every unsigned solo with free MP3s and a virtual tip jar, "payment optional" is hardly a new deal.
Even so, the distinction here is obvious. Radiohead is a major international act that has demonstrated its ability to debut an album at the top of the charts and sell a million copies in the U.S. alone. After wrapping up their contract with EMI in 2003 they could have rung up any of the major or major-minor labels and entered serious negotiations for a big money record deal. Not selling out is a different kind of decision when there are plenty of interested buyers with deep pockets.
And like a lot of people, I'm happy to see anything that motivates more public dialog about getting past the absurdly counterproductive artificial restrictions of the conventional market for music (and indeed for information in general).
So much for philosophy: on to the commerce experience.
I'll lead with the negatives. If Radiohead deserves bigger kudos for risking an unconventional distribution strategy as a big ticket act, then I give them worse marks for delivering a somewhat clunky, confusing sales experience. When I used it the website was very slow, and the actual transaction was not straightforward.
There are only two products for sale on the site - a costly (around $80 U.S.) discbox that includes vinyl LPs and CDs in premium packaging, and the price-unspecified digital download. Since a download is included in the price of the discbox, there is no reason to purchase more than one of these items. So the fact that the purchaser is forced to go through an "add item to cart/proceed to checkout" sales process is pointless and particularly irritating when each redundant click initiates another glacially slow page load (to add insult to injury, you have to click through two pointless front pages to get to the point where you can actually elect to purchase. I could have saved you the trouble by linking directly to the order page, but I'd hate for you to miss out on the complete Radiohead experience).
Now I could be accused of nitpicking, so I want to reiterate: to the extent that Radiohead made a statement about the roll affordable digital downloads can and should play in commercial music, they diluted this statement by delivering a poorly executed and tedious commerce experience.
Other cons included the fact that the site failed to deliver specifics about the download - format, number of tracks, or overall length - details I considered important to setting a price for the download (I eventually found these facts reported by third parties), some glitches in the checkout process resulting in getting kicked back to blank forms, and the fact that the download delivered only the MP3 tracks, no artwork or lyrics (I know I'm bucking established trends but damn it, delivering data is cheap. If you've got more, give it! Particularly when the purchaser's only options are a very expensive premium physical product versus a bare-bones digital download). Finally, I'm never thrilled when a purchase form requires I enter a mobile phone number. What if Radiohead won't stop texting me?
Moving on to the positives: I'd say that purchasing the album was not a terrible experience, merely substandard. Once I made it to the actual payment screen things went smoothly enough, and I quickly ended up with a link to a reasonably speedy download. The price was right - I elected to pay what I consider a very reasonable $3 (I'll tell you right now that my opinion that the general cost of music online is inflated is going to be an ongoing theme here) - which came out to £1.47. They tacked on a £0.45 service fee for a total £1.92 or about $3.92 U.S. For this I received a 48.4 MB zip archive of 10 160kbps MP3s. The tracks had correctly encoded metadata (mangled or absent track metadata is a HUGE pet peeve) so firing it up in iTunes was a cinch. I had successfully purchased my first Radiohead album. I liked it.
The bottom line: while I wouldn't tolerate this sort of technical incompetence from a website dedicated to selling digital music, I'm going to give Radiohead the benefit of the doubt in assuming that inexperience in the digital market and underestimating the volume of response the offer would receive were more at work in what was wrong with this transaction than actual indifference to the purchaser experience. So on the three point scale I just this moment invented of Props, Shrugs or Hate, I give Radiohead Props. Congratulations, Radiohead, you can now proudly display "the Phree Musique Blog gave the In Rainbows purchase site props!" on your website. Note: not anymore, as noted above. You mopey Limey bastards.
See previous reviews and submit sites for review at the Index Page
Of course I'm pushing two weeks behind the curve of the hype on the Radiohead "pay what you like" digital download of their latest album, In Rainbows.
And I'll admit: a part of me is a little annoyed by the degree of swooning, "this changes everything" coverage Radiohead's payment-optional experiment has received. I covered Jane Siberry doing this very thing in March of '06, and it was old news then (what Siberry calls "self-determined pricing" is still the standard at her site and it is still well worth checking out, incidentally). From "try it for free, buy if you feel it" presentations like Harvey Danger to every unsigned solo with free MP3s and a virtual tip jar, "payment optional" is hardly a new deal.
Even so, the distinction here is obvious. Radiohead is a major international act that has demonstrated its ability to debut an album at the top of the charts and sell a million copies in the U.S. alone. After wrapping up their contract with EMI in 2003 they could have rung up any of the major or major-minor labels and entered serious negotiations for a big money record deal. Not selling out is a different kind of decision when there are plenty of interested buyers with deep pockets.
And like a lot of people, I'm happy to see anything that motivates more public dialog about getting past the absurdly counterproductive artificial restrictions of the conventional market for music (and indeed for information in general).
So much for philosophy: on to the commerce experience.
I'll lead with the negatives. If Radiohead deserves bigger kudos for risking an unconventional distribution strategy as a big ticket act, then I give them worse marks for delivering a somewhat clunky, confusing sales experience. When I used it the website was very slow, and the actual transaction was not straightforward.
There are only two products for sale on the site - a costly (around $80 U.S.) discbox that includes vinyl LPs and CDs in premium packaging, and the price-unspecified digital download. Since a download is included in the price of the discbox, there is no reason to purchase more than one of these items. So the fact that the purchaser is forced to go through an "add item to cart/proceed to checkout" sales process is pointless and particularly irritating when each redundant click initiates another glacially slow page load (to add insult to injury, you have to click through two pointless front pages to get to the point where you can actually elect to purchase. I could have saved you the trouble by linking directly to the order page, but I'd hate for you to miss out on the complete Radiohead experience).
Now I could be accused of nitpicking, so I want to reiterate: to the extent that Radiohead made a statement about the roll affordable digital downloads can and should play in commercial music, they diluted this statement by delivering a poorly executed and tedious commerce experience.
Other cons included the fact that the site failed to deliver specifics about the download - format, number of tracks, or overall length - details I considered important to setting a price for the download (I eventually found these facts reported by third parties), some glitches in the checkout process resulting in getting kicked back to blank forms, and the fact that the download delivered only the MP3 tracks, no artwork or lyrics (I know I'm bucking established trends but damn it, delivering data is cheap. If you've got more, give it! Particularly when the purchaser's only options are a very expensive premium physical product versus a bare-bones digital download). Finally, I'm never thrilled when a purchase form requires I enter a mobile phone number. What if Radiohead won't stop texting me?
Moving on to the positives: I'd say that purchasing the album was not a terrible experience, merely substandard. Once I made it to the actual payment screen things went smoothly enough, and I quickly ended up with a link to a reasonably speedy download. The price was right - I elected to pay what I consider a very reasonable $3 (I'll tell you right now that my opinion that the general cost of music online is inflated is going to be an ongoing theme here) - which came out to £1.47. They tacked on a £0.45 service fee for a total £1.92 or about $3.92 U.S. For this I received a 48.4 MB zip archive of 10 160kbps MP3s. The tracks had correctly encoded metadata (mangled or absent track metadata is a HUGE pet peeve) so firing it up in iTunes was a cinch. I had successfully purchased my first Radiohead album. I liked it.
The bottom line: while I wouldn't tolerate this sort of technical incompetence from a website dedicated to selling digital music, I'm going to give Radiohead the benefit of the doubt in assuming that inexperience in the digital market and underestimating the volume of response the offer would receive were more at work in what was wrong with this transaction than actual indifference to the purchaser experience. So on the three point scale I just this moment invented of Props, Shrugs or Hate, I give Radiohead Props. Congratulations, Radiohead, you can now proudly display "the Phree Musique Blog gave the In Rainbows purchase site props!" on your website. Note: not anymore, as noted above. You mopey Limey bastards.
See previous reviews and submit sites for review at the Index Page
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