Remember me writing last week about my negative customer experience with CD Baby? This morning Don Dokken made it so I could only buy his second solo album Solitary ($9.99, been available online since Feb 2008) through the service Snocap via dokkenstore.com.

Didn’t go through as many screenshot motions as I did with CD Baby, but Snocap wouldn’t let me add my credit card in Firefox so I could finish the order. I kept hitting the ’submit’ button and nothing happened. Grrrr.

When I fired up Internet Explorer things seemed to work correctly, but minor gripe, why as a first time customer do I have to do the following:

1. check box next to the song to order
2. confirm order
3. be taken to another browser window — hey I’m already in one — to visit Snocap to register for the site and add payment information on file. Why not open in a tab? And why not wait for the other browser window until we actually add payment information and can verify we are on a secure page?
4. In IE I saw an option to use PayPal. After authorizing, did the system take me back to finish the order? Of course not. So back to the other browser tab to try the order again.
5. This time it went through and asked me if I wanted to download the Snocap download manager or download the songs direct. By all means to anybody reading, choose to download the songs direct.

From experience I should have done that, but didn’t. Next, the order screen turned into a message saying there was an error returned from the software. Meanwhile, the Snocap download manager was still installing. Huh? When it fully installed and ran it didn’t show any music for me to download.

[sigh] Here we go again. Didn’t we just do this a week ago with CD Baby?

6. I went directly to the Snocap site and checked this out:

The ultimate website NON-confidence builder: big, broken image. The screenshot might be a bit small but there is only a ‘profile’ link and ’sign out’ — nothing about account or transaction history. They lose points for not making this more clear. When you click on ‘profile’ you can then navigate to your transaction history.

7. And there, finally, I can download the songs one at a time without having to use the download manager. I didn’t see any way to add the songs to the snocap download manager. Fortunately all the songs from Solitary downloaded.

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.

I’m starting to understand, but still don’t think it’s cool, people who go the bittorent route to get the hard to find music. Enough of this, what about the Don Dokken solo acoustic album, Solitary. Is it any good?

It’s mellow, I’ll say that. Have to listen to it more to judge but I’ve always liked Don Dokken’s mellow stuff. On his first solo album the song "1,000 miles Away" is one of my favorites. With Dokken who doesn’t like "Alone Again?"  And pretty much the entire Under Lock and Key album (ok, not every song is mellow on there, but that one seemed like one of the most mellow Dokken albums) with tracks like "It’s Not Love" and "Jaded Heart." Then there are some more rare and less commercially appreciated albums like Dysfunctional with excellent songs like "The Maze" and "From The Beginning."

In the official Dokken podcast #2 and elsewhere Don Dokken keeps saying that this year’s good selling Lightning Strikes Again (my favorite track off that one is "Oasis") is probably the last Dokken studio album. He wants to do something outside what he feels are the musical confines of Dokken. Something "harder." Rhino, the company who published Lightning would like another Dokken album but it doesn’t sound like Don Dokken is interested at the present time.

One request, whatever you do, Don: please make it easy and hassle-free to buy whatever album you make going forward. This is something for musicians to keep in mind with how they choose to distribute their music. If you make it too much of a pain in the ass, some (many?) fans will take the path of least resistance. A quick search engine query reveals tons of illegal avenues to acquire Solitary.

Solitary Track List

1. "In The Meadow"
2. "I’ll Never Forget" - the ID tags in this MP3 were not set correctly and I had to manually fix. Good thing it’s easy to do these days in a wide variety of software.
3. "Where The Grass Is Green"
4. "Ship Of Fools"
5. "You Are Everything"
6. "Venice"
7. "Sarah" - Don Dokken says this song is about a "first love" he had in the 80s. One of the better tracks.
8. "The Tragedy"
9. Someday

If you like the harder Dokken songs like "Breaking The Chains" then Lightning Strikes Again will be more satisfying. If, like me, you enjoy the mellow side of Dokken, roll the dice with Snocap or attend one of the Don Dokken solo shows when he starts doing them again (he’s out touring with Dokken in support of Lightning now). He is selling Solitary at his shows. I wish he’d consider using a service like Tunecore.com which will get his music out on iTunes, AmazonMP3, Rhapsody, Napster, EMusic and more.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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