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