CD Baby MP3 digital download service takes hours to deliver MP3 |
When I buy digital music downloads from places like iTunes and AmazonMP3 the music is available, as expected, for download right away. This morning I bought an album in MP3 format from an indie rock artist, Heavy Jack, from CD Baby. Believe that this was my first ever CD Baby purchase.
One of the things I like about CD Baby is they take a very small percentage of the money from the sale. Via their artist signup site:
For digital sales, we keep only a 9% cut, paying 91% of all income directly to the artist. For physical CDs, we keep $4 per CD sold.
Good deal for artists/bands, I’m there. So yesterday I checked out this music discovery service and came across Heavy Jack. Loved their song Fly Away (Black Crow), particularly the Hendrix-like vibe, embed is below for readers from the blog (won’t show in RSS feed):
Good stuff, I wanted to show them some material ($) fan love and thus went to their website this morning and saw I could purchase their album in CD or MP3 format. I went for the MP3 format which cost $9.99. I used PayPal and received confirmation that CD Baby was paid right away at 7:02am PST.
What I didn’t receive as expected was a download link from CD Baby or explanation of when the download link would be coming. I waited. And waited. Waited. Started to wonder around 10 minutes if the order didn’t go through on CD Baby’s end. Hey, sometimes things happen.
30 minutes later I decided to write an email to CD Baby with a copy of the transaction number and ask them how long it took to get the download link? I didn’t expect to receive a response to this email right away. If I got a response by the end of the business day, I’d be happy. Through experience have learned to set expectations lower when emailing customer service of any site online. It’s a pleasant surprise when somebody responds right away, but a business day is reasonable.
49 minutes after the sale, I received an email with the subject line: "CD Baby loves Tdavid" and order # confirmation:
Nevermind being anal about their script failing to capitalize the ‘D’ in my name, that’s just nitpicky, what does matter is that the download link they provided in their email didn’t work. The page just errored out. Waited a few more minutes, figuring maybe there was another delay before the download link was activated. As silly as that seems, have seen that situation before. Nope, didn’t matter, still didn’t work.
In their ‘love me’ email they added the message:
If you’re not able to use that link from this email or just not
ready to download yet, you can always log in to your account at
http://cdbaby.com/account and find all of your MP3s in the "Your
Downloads" section.
Hello, I was able and ready 55 minutes ago. If you love me, just give me a download link that works already. Where is the music I paid for? WTF is up with this place? I don’t walk into a music store and pay them for a CD and then come back and hour later and still can’t get the CD to take home. This isn’t ordering a pizza on a Friday night when the parlor is getting slammed and they are understaffed, it’s an automated web order system for a digital download.
1 hour 25 minutes (8:27am PST) after the sale and all I see when I click the download link in CD Baby is this:
At this point I thought maybe, maybe the download link would work on another computer. Tried it on my laptop. No work in Firefox or Internet Explorer.
1 hour 42 minutes here I sit still unable to download music from the link. If I was into BDSM I’d try buying another MP3 download from CD Baby for a different artist just to see if this negative customer experience was an isolated case. Instead, I’m making this blog post for others to tell me their CD Baby MP3 purchase customer experiences. Did you get your MP3 download right away? Did it take more than a couple hours? Did the download link not work at first and work later?
1 hour 53 minutes. Still no working download. I’m getting ready to hit publish on this post. Some say you should never blog mad, I say when your wallet is impacted: screw that! This is a bad experience.
2 hours. Wow. The download link finally worked! I’m going to publish this as written anyway to see if this is the norm for CD Baby MP3 purchases. If this is the normal customer experience, CD Baby is one torturing lover. If you run a music delivery service, don’t make your customers wait two hours for digital downloads. Two minutes, fine. Two hours and it’s time to hire new programmers.
Update 10:02am PST: Received an email response from “pony” at CD Baby apologizing for their servers being down this morning while they did some work.
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TDavid -
I’ve always been a BIG fan of CDBaby, who do an excellent job of providing physical product from indie artists I know and love. They give many artists that I love, an easy option to sell their product that gives the artist more time to make music and play shows while CDBaby handle the merchandising/customer satisfaction side of things.
And as you outlined, they have a fair revenue split with the artist. CDBaby have always had a good reputation with the artists that they serve, and in my experience have gone above and beyond with customer service - I’ve always gotten product from them a lot faster compared to orders I place with other music retailers.
Sorry to hear your first experience with CDBaby was a frustrating one - sounds like you got a reasonable explanation from “pony.” I haven’t used their download service, so I can’t comment on that.
With me, they’ve always been a winner, although I am troubled by the recent sale of the company to Disc Makers.
Really bummed, actually.
End of an era.
http://sivers.org/bye-bye-baby
Comment by Matt — September 4, 2008 @ 10:51 am PST
Let us know how it turns out. Did they give you any indication as to when the problem would be fixed? Seems as if they would have an idea–today, within the next few hours, etc. I’ve never used them, so I’ll be watching to see how this plays out for you.
Comment by UptakeInOH — September 6, 2008 @ 7:46 am PST
Haven’t retried their service by buying any additional music, but will definitely update if/when I do. Giving them the benefit of the doubt that this was an isolated case.
The MP3 album I bought was ripped at
200kbps VBR320kbps and sounds good. I can’t get enough of Heavy Jack! These guys rip.Comment by TDavid — September 6, 2008 @ 9:45 am PST
Hey TDavid,
Heavy Jack here & after reading this blog post we have decided to look into this to make sure it is an isolated incident. We know that CDBaby has had server problems in the past, as when we released our CD there was server problems that day as well.
I noticed that you said the mp3s you downloaded were ripped @ 200kbps, I was under the assumption from when I tested downloading our album from CDBaby that it should be ripped @ 320kbps - or at least that is what I got when I test-downloaded our album from CDBaby.
I can’t imagine it is the Heavy Jack knocking out their servers, but maybe we should back it down from 11 to 10 on the volume dial, the Jack is pretty powerful stuff.
Thanks again TDavid for posting this blog, it didn’t come across as mad, rather level headed & informative. We appreciate your support for the band & are happy you did finally receive your download of Heavy Jack ~ Multiply.
Cheers,
Adam Falk
Heavy Jack
www.heavyjack.com
Comment by Heavy Jack — September 10, 2008 @ 9:31 am PST
[…] Why is buying music from some of these online music sites a hassle? I’ve had very good experiences with AmazonMP3, iTunes and Zune but my last two experiences with services I haven’t used before has not been good. I was pleased to see the artist, Heavy Jack, reply this morning to my experience last week and say they are looking into it. […]
Pingback by Another subpar online music purchase customer experience » Make You Go Hmm — September 10, 2008 @ 12:19 pm PST
Thanks for stopping by Heavy Jack - sorry, I stand corrected, your album is showing as 320kbps.
Comment by TDavid — September 10, 2008 @ 12:34 pm PST
Hey, this is Pony. That’s right, the same Pony mentioned in the blog.
When you buy an MP3 from CD Baby, it’s permanently stored in a kind of “library” in your CD Baby account, where it’s always available for download. One morning we were moving our server to an air-conditioned location and unfortunately this knocked out all our MP3s for the first part of the day, right when ol’ TDavid bought the MP3. So he’s absolutely right, it didn’t work when he first bought it.
We get in at about 7am, and we immediately realized that something was wrong and scrambled to get it fixed. During this time TDavid bought an MP3 and it didn’t work. He emailed us about 30 minutes later. By the time I read the email (about an hour after that) everything was back again and I told him so.
I’m not trying to make excuses here. The server was down, and the MP3s didn’t work for a few hours. We busted our asses getting it working again.
Should we have shut the whole website down so people couldn’t place orders? Then Heavy Jack might not have gotten the sale at all. We had to make a judgment call at the moment, and the call was to keep taking orders and get it fixed. That way, our artists could still get their music to our customers (even if there was a short delay).
Everything works fine 99.9% of the time, but I think most understand that technical problems happen now and again. We certainly did our best to respond to all the calls and emails we got that morning, and made sure to explain what was going on. There were plenty of people that got pissed at us for not having their MP3s ready immediately. Some people wanted their purchase canceled and their money refunded. If that’s what they wanted, we did it without question.
What we SHOULD have done (and it was noted here at CD Baby, trust me) is had a message appear on the website telling people what was going on, so we didn’t get the flood of angry emails and disappointed customers. But unfortunately this happened before most of our programmers arrived that day, and it was fixed pretty quickly. So I apologize to TDavid about the frustration of not knowing what was going on.
We are working harder than ever here, and no one should worry about the sale to Disc Makers. Trust me. As an employee of CD Baby, I myself was pretty sketched out when I heard about it. But the Disc Makers people are totally cool, and they seem totally enthused about making CD Baby provide more and better services for our artists and customers. Derek was never around anyway; he wanted to move on and did the right thing by selling the company.
Whether you buy or sell music at CD Baby, I think you’ll realize that we’re just the same as always. If our service starts getting worse, call us on it. Seriously, we need to hear it.
TDavid, or anyone else who’s reading this: If you EVER have a problem with your CD Baby purchase, you can email me personally and I’ll bend over backward to make it right. My email address is: pony@cdbaby.com. Keep in mind, Friday and Saturday are my days off.
-Pony
Comment by Pony — September 12, 2008 @ 2:22 pm PST
Hey thanks a lot for taking the time to make that comment, Pony, and offer to help. I will do business with CD Baby again someday without hesitation. I am not dissuaded by this one off rare happening.
Comment by TDavid — September 12, 2008 @ 5:10 pm PST
Same experience here. I ordered an mp3 download weeks ago, never got it, talked to them twice, emailed several times, it was always the same thing, it will be there tomorrow. I found out that thousands and thousands of orders failed in the weeks after they released a new version of their site and those people never got their product and one could guess the artist may not get paid, but cdbaby did get paid. this issue has been going on for several weeks now, you can’t even get through by phone now. I will be surprised if they survive this major screw up. And to think it was all caused by a few really poor programmers. Can you tell I’m, a programmer…. LOL It sucks to be them right now… Or sucks to be any artist that chooses to sell through them….
Comment by Duke Luke — July 21, 2009 @ 3:21 pm PST
I have been trying to download an cd from cdbaby since July 25th. Today is July 28th and as it is now 11.30pm approximately in Oregon I doubt I shall receive an answer before the 29th. I received a receipt immediately for the $9.99 I paid but I am still getting the following answer when I try to download my cd. “Still getting your order together….” . This is beyond a joke as I have sent three emails to which I have received no reply.
Comment by carole ayes — July 27, 2009 @ 11:25 pm PST
Hi there everyone, Pony here again.
My two cents:
Right when we launched the new website, we had another server malfunction (more serious than the one last fall). This happened at the exact same time that we were importing CRAPTONS of data from the old website into the new one, essentially slowing everything down immensely. (yeah yeah, I know: “Get new servers!”, right? I guess I don’t even understand that highly technical stuff enough to know how realistic that is)
Anyway, at the same time that this was happening, we were receiving THOUSANDS of emails from confused customers and artists, asking questions about the new site. Within one day, we were buried in emails. And not only did we suddenly start receiving five times the VOLUME of emails (not to mention phone calls), we ALSO started using a new email-answering program within our back-end system the same day, which we ourselves were still learning to use.
The combination of the new website, the server malfunction and (to be perfectly honest) our OWN initial learning curve created an unexpected situation where we could no longer answer emails within an acceptable time frame. If anyone has dealt with CD Baby customer service in the past, you know that this is NOT normal for us.
This morning, I sent an email out to all of our customers that were waiting for a response from Amy and I about their MP3s. There were emails in there from as far back as the 15th. Basically, I had no choice but to clear out all the standing emails, because otherwise I was wasting time answering the same customer’s multiple attempts to reach us, and emailing about situations that had been resolved over the phone up to 2 weeks ago.
Now, I need everyone who had a problem with a CD Baby download to email us again, at cdbaby@cdbaby.com. I ABSOLUTELY promise we will take care of this for you all, even if it takes longer than usual.
I’m not going to lie here. We’re still retrieving THOUSANDS of digital albums from our back-up, and it’s still going to take some time. I might not be able to get the download to work (especially if it is still in the process of being retrieved/re-encoded) but I’ll at least give you a full refund.
Yeah, it sucks to be me (although I don’t really think a “LOL” is appropriate). You guys can’t even understand how bummed we are to not be able to respond right away to emails that we get. We’ve always taken pride in our customer service and obviously we were under-prepared for this situation. So if you sent me an email before yesterday, it probably has been deleted, so PLEASE email again right away.
Please know that in most cases, we ARE still paying artists for their download sales even when the customer is refunded.
I’m guessing that this “major screw-up” will be behind us within a few weeks, and until then it’s gonna be a little rocky. If you’ve always loved CD Baby, please be patient with us right now. It’s still the same old us, we’re just having a rough patch.
Comment by pony — July 28, 2009 @ 11:35 am PST
Read the recent threads at cdbaby.org and you’ll get an explanation for your download experience. Sadly, it’s a Titanic disaster unfolding at CD Baby over the past three weeks.
The new programming that underpins the relaunch of the site is fundamentally, even fatally, flawed.
CD Baby’s dedicated staff in customer service and other departments are doing their best to keep bailing the water out, but the structure is sinking. The site is broken and it seems clear that only replacing its old system will save a lot more problems before the inevitable.
Comment by Tony — July 30, 2009 @ 6:49 pm PST
Well, it’s true that the site is broken in many ways… but to say that it’s “fatally flawed” is a gross overstatement. Wack servers, lost wishlists, the omission of “Scotland” from the address drop-down menu, and a few other major glitches… all these things are stupid and they suck, but they’re not exactly SINKING us.
The old website was broken in many ways too, but we had years and years to develop workarounds for the old site’s glitches.
So Tony, I’d be interested to know which of the new site’s flaw’s are “fatal”. The threads at cdbaby.org are all posted on by (legitimately) pissed-off artists who didn’t get their accounting section for a couple weeks after the relaunch, or had trouble accessing or doing stuff with their accounts.
I’ve seen VERY few people posting on .org about not receiving their downloads, because those people know that if they email cdbaby@cdbaby.com, I’ll refund them if their download didn’t work. It just might take me a few days to get to the email, because we’re so swamped.
Comment by pony — July 31, 2009 @ 10:17 am PST
Hi, I ordered some songs about half an hour ago from CDBaby for the first time. Like you, I was expecting to be able to download the songs right away… so when that didn’t happen, I wondered if that was normal and searched on google and found your blog.
I read the comments above and understand CD Baby is working through some problems. It does seem like they could at very least update their site FAQs to explain the ongoing issue.
I’ll post again to let you know how long it takes.
Comment by S.P. Gass — August 1, 2009 @ 7:14 pm PST
Update: The next day, I see the download buttons for the songs I ordered, but I’m getting the following message when clicking the buttons:
“Sorry - we still haven’t gotten your download together yet.
Please give us a few more minutes and try again.”
Comment by S.P. Gass — August 2, 2009 @ 1:24 pm PST
I’m an artist who sent a newly-minted CD to CDBaby for distribution a few weeks ago. I keep checking my account info but inventory is still zero. I have spent hours on hold all week, hearing the message over and over, “Sorry we haven’t been able to respond to emails…if you want to contact us, send us an email…”
When I did a Google search for “can’t get through to CDBaby” I found this blog. A post on cdbaby.net (for artists) would really help allay concerns, and cut down on the phone calls and emails. We just want the 411.
Comment by Eireen — August 7, 2009 @ 11:34 am PST
Pony, it’d be great to hear your perspective on where things are at today.
I less frequently visit the CD Baby org forums, as the news seems not to be improving - and just checking CD Baby on facebook, I see an equally concerned and distraught group of people.
Do you still believe the new programming can be fixed? What’s up?
thanks! Ad
Comment by Adrian — August 26, 2009 @ 12:31 pm PST
Any good news - anyone?!
Comment by Adrian — September 22, 2009 @ 9:25 pm PST
I did get my CD up and running; I had to post to the public forums (cdbaby.org) and a customer service rep came to my aid. AFAIK most people are getting answers that way.
Comment by Eireen — September 22, 2009 @ 10:12 pm PST
Hey all, this is Pony. I’ve spent the last two weeks at DM in New Jersey, training some of the folks here to help us answer overflow phone calls (basically taking phone orders and helping out customers - so you don’t lose any sales)…
… I’ve also had some VERY promising meetings with key programmers, marketing & sales dudes, and all-around important people.
I have to say that I’ve been really encouraged by the attitudes of management here, and their desire for feedback from the front-line CD Babies (which of course, comes to us from YOU).
Anything I should tell them while I’m out here? Be nice…
Comment by Pony — September 23, 2009 @ 4:51 am PST
I ordered some songs from CD Baby three days ago - still not available for download. Furthermore, they don´t answer my e-mails (tried several times). Why keep on selling things that is not delivered? Hmmm.
Comment by Sven — September 30, 2009 @ 4:59 am PST
Hi Pony ~
There’s lots of things people would like to see fixed/restored - and Sven notes a concern of a would-be music purchaser.
I can boil our primary requests down to two things, from the artist perspective, and would welcome you getting the folks in New Jersey to commit to fixing:
1) search functions, including “sounds like” - we find that hits and sales of our physical CDs have been decimated since the relaunch and this appears related to the fact that people visiting the site can no longer discover our CDs as they did in the past
2) Digital Distribution partner sales and reporting - with physical CD sales sidelined until the search+ functions can be improved, our digital sales are more important than ever. For years we could pretty much predict when we’d receive a big lump (eg. from iTunes), and when we’d encounter smaller payment weeks, and we’d operate accordingly. Now, however, the whole rhythm of payments is off - and we experience weeks in a row with zero sales, which is pretty much unheard of in our experience. Either sales are getting lost in the system, or only partially reported, or, are being delayed in ways that never happened before
We’d love to see the on-site search issues solved, and the digital partner revenues restored to their former amounts and their regularity!
thanks very much, Adrian
Comment by Adrian — September 30, 2009 @ 1:31 pm PST
Hey Sven this is Alec at CD Baby,
We are (like everyone probably knows) quite backed up on emails at this point but if you let me know what your sales order number is then I can make sure your download works for you.
Alec
Comment by Alec — September 30, 2009 @ 1:44 pm PST
I have been waiting months now for a promised download. CD Baby offered to refund my purchase price AND send the download, a sign of good faith. That was months ago, still waiting!!!!
Comment by Carole Hayes — October 8, 2009 @ 4:43 pm PST
Hi, i stumbled across your post as I was looking for an alternative to CDBaby as an artist. Prior to the switch over I’ve enjoyed and would even praise the work at CDBaby. But i just put up another disc/download and even used their service for duplication.
It was nothing but troubles from the get go, I never recieved a reply to any inquiries with my issues(which the above mention of backed up emails could explain). But once things were finally good and we were sent out discs and we set it up w/ CD baby and send in the discs: well things have just been unsatisfactory. The digital distribution has been minimal (in comparison to the turnaround time on previous releases), is there even a tab in the new system to see where your release was digitally distributed to? Even though they received our disc, it took at least a week (in comparison to a couple days, for the system to show that they have discs in stock). I’m sorry i can’t make this post a bit more organized but i’m typing from work on the go, just wanted to let people know that despite official CDBaby input here that things are not fine and dandy and that the service provided by CDBaby under new ownership has significantly decreased.
Comment by Martin — October 14, 2009 @ 1:16 pm PST
Hello there,
same with me, yesterday ordered first time at cdbaby, there is a download link, yes, but the connection is deadly slow, so the estitmatet download time is about 45 minutes for one album, so ist stops before the end due to time limitation. Tried several times with different browsers and programs
No respond to email. Never use cdbaby again
Birgit
Comment by Birgit — October 24, 2009 @ 12:31 am PST