music

About this TIDAL win-back campaign

~ Enno ~ Leave a comment

WiMP sent me an email telling me that they are now called TIDAL, and as one does as a startup, they tried to win me back as a user by offering a three month free trial. I’m unhappy enough with the state of music streaming that I was going to give this a shot, but their campaign ultimately failed to win me over, for several reasons.

1. The link in the email goes to a registration page, with no mention of the email campaign. As a customer, I already feel like I’m in the wrong place, but as a developer, my guess is that this is just laziness. Someone probably added a parameter to the URL to track the campaign, but was sloppy on copy writing and custom code, especially in a foreign language (I browse in English).

2. I should be a registered user, because I had a WiMP account once that should have gotten transferred in the TIDAL rebranding. Since I used my Twitter account to register, I clicked the Twitter button on that page to gain access, but that ultimately results in an error message telling me that this account already exists. This is why you don’t recycle the general registration page for your win-back campaign.

3. I go through the email plus password process, where I have to enter my email twice, and then get an error message stating that “This email address is already registered”. Guessing that what it really wants to tell me is that my password did not match (that training as a developer comes in again), I try another password, and I am in. Or am I?

4. The next step immediately asks me for payment information. And this is where you’ve finally lost me. I’m here for a free trial, not to give somebody my credit card info, before I’ve even seen what the service is. If you want to run a free trial in this day and age, then you must not ask for credit card info until the trial is up, or users won’t even give your product a chance. I can’t believe I am seeing this.

5. Your only payment methods are VISA, Mastercard, Amex and Paypal? That’s bold. When I was at IMVU, we implemented several dozen payment options, and even in Norway I get a menu with at least three additional non-CC options. And while Paypal and VISA make up the the bulk of the payment, can you really say no to the additional revenue from SMS payments, bank transfers or prepaid cards?

6. Trying to send this rant to a human being at TIDAL leads me to their support page, and in roundabout steps to a Google Docs feedback form (more signs that there are no developers) which allows no more than 1000 characters. I understand that database storage space costs money, but WTF? This post is way above 2000 characters already. Are you sure that you 

“appreciate you taking the time to share your feedback with us”? I’ll send them a link to this post instead, and hope that they go through the trouble of clicking through.

Overall, I suspect that this

campaign

has not been properly A/B tested, and that the TIDAL business development team is not aggressive enough about chasing new opportunities. Sure, all of this requires implementation resources, and developers are expensive, but your competitors are willing to make that investment, and if you continue to leave money and opportunities on the table, they will be happy to take up your slack.

~ Enno ~ Leave a comment

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/playlists/44200427″ params=”visual=true&liking=false&sharing=false&auto_play=false&show_comments=false&continuous_play=false&origin=tumblr” width=”100%” height=”500″ iframe=”true” /]

Taking time out from the vacation with a day spent sitting in the garden, making a mixtape for my sister.

Solved: “File marked as permanent failure on server”

~ Enno ~ Leave a comment

Google Music has this annoying problem where it will sometimes barf on your MP3 files with the error message you see above. And it won’t tell you what’s wrong, either. The internet doesn’t know, either.

So I set out to take those unprocessed files and apply any change to them I could think of, until one of them made the upload work. And the answer is (drumroll): Bad VBR headers. I suspect these are created by bad MP3 encoders, in my case by LAME3.99r.

To fix this, you can install Foobar2000 (still the best multi-format Swiss army knife of a music player), and perform “right click on the file -> Utilities -> Fix VBR MP3 header”. After you rewrite the file, Music Manager will detect that it has changed, find it to be no longer broken, and upload it.

You’ll want to open up %LOCALAPPDATA%GoogleMusicManagerFailureReport.txt and scan this for all the files that MusicManager complained about, then fix the MBR headers on those.  

the sixtyone – a music adventure

~ Enno ~ Leave a comment

I recently discovered the sixtyone, a webpage that’s sort of a game to discover music. You gain points for certain activities on the site (like listening to new music), and you can spend them to bump songs you enjoy. If a song you bumped gets bumped by more people afterwards, you gain more points – so predicting good music makes you level faster. Fun idea. But the best part of it: You get some really good music.

Try the sixtyone. And when you’re there, check out ugress 🙂

Music Quiz

~ Enno ~ 3 Comments

The following is one of my favorite pieces of music. Not because of it’s musical merits, but because it immediately conjures up the time around the Anarchy Online Launch, when we were working hard to Finish The Game. Somebody shared this around the office, and while I’m not sure about its origin, rumor has it that it was made by one of the guys in the audio department.

And now for to the quiz part of this post: Where are all those sound bites from? Having grown up with a lot of dubbing before I first heard this track, I had a vague idea about a few, and since then, new bits have been popping up every now and then when I was watching TV or movies. This is part of what makes this fun to me: I knew the sound bites first, and I’m finding the references later.

So far, I can tell:

  • Shall we play a game? is from War Games, of course.
  • We need more monkeys! … We’re formulating a new plan! – from Toy Story, the scene where they try to use they Barrel of Monkeys to save Buzz.
  • You said bullshit and experience is all it takes, right? – Google says this is from 48 Hrs, which I never saw.
  • Beavis and Butthead are in there, probably a clip from the “Vistual Stupidity” computer game.
  • Unorganized Grabasstic Pieces of Amphibian Shit is from Full Metal Jacket
  • Not enough time is from Heat.

But there’s a lot of them I have no clue about. Got any ideas?