With that in mind, imagine my glee when I got the following email today.

Imagine now my complete lack of sympathy or surprise at this.

I’m sure some commentators will jump on this is ‘proving’ that subscription music services are simply not a viable business option. Let’s be clear; Virgin failed because they screwed the entire thing up. They had a working system which had some minor flaws, but instead of fixing the problems they relaunched an entirely different service which failed spectacularly and likely lost them most of their customers as a result. It’s difficult to recover from something like that. The only thing that baffles me is how they survived this long.

I remain convinced that music subscriptions are the way to go, all that has to happen is someone needs to sell it properly and have a system that works. It’s purely perception; many people baulk at the suggestion of not ‘owning’ their music (when in reality they don’t own it at all), yet they won’t bat an eyelid at paying £20 a month to rent television shows in the form of a cable or satellite subscription. The failure of any of the music subscription services to hit the mainstream is partly technical, as we’ve seen with Virgin, but it’s also a massive failure of marketing. As much as I hate to say it, I think if there is one company with the marketing muscle to pull it off, it’s Apple. If iTunes started such a service, it would be a success. I’m continually baffled as to what it is they think they have to lose by not doing so.

Problem with Purchase
Unfortunately, there was a problem with your purchase.
Extra Info : Machine can not be activated for dwnld/dwnld lic

Another week, another complaint to tech support. 5 days later and the only response I get tells me that I just need to reinstall Windows Media Player and force an upgrade of the WMA DRM components (“Oh, is that all,” I hear you mutter). Unsurprisingly, that made no difference whatsoever on either machine I tried it on.

Several people I’ve related this tale of woe to have rightly asked why I still bother with Virgin Digital. I liken it to some kind of game. The objective of this game for Virgin is to try and restore a service they once had perfectly under control and then deliberately broke. If they can’t manage that, their secondary objective is to at least retain some semblance of credibility. I think it’s fair to say that #2 is pretty much of of their reach at this point, while #1 is seeming pretty far from their grasp. My own objective, which was once to actually use the service, is now to simply document the deepening levels of incompetence Virgin Digital sink to in their pursuit of #1 and #2.

It’s now been three weeks since the new service was launched in a completely non-functional state, and less than two until the end of my current billing cycle. I’m sensing a refund request coming in two weeks’ time.

Literally nothing else on the somewhat large list of problems I described has been fixed, including the subscription downloads feature. Being able to download tracks is the biggest feature of both the Basic £9.99 and Premium £14.99 a month plans, the other feature being the ability to listen to full-length streaming tracks via the website. The streaming does work, at least most of the time, though bugs still exist in the Player section of the site – while playing a list of tracks, the player will frequently stop halfway through after finishing a track, and refuse to advance to the next track until you press the Next, Back, and Next buttons (in that order). The Premium plan is also supposed to let me copy said downloaded tracks to a compatible MP3 player, but given I can’t even download them, that’s off the table too.

In a somewhat telling bug, the website in fact claims that I am only on the £9.99 plan instead of the £14.99 plan that I am actually on – which in effect is true because none of the extra features on the £14.99 plan actually work. The new signup page claims that the Premium plan hasn’t even launched yet. That didn’t stop Virgin from billing me £14.99 though, and when I made a complaint asking why I’d been billed extra, I got this response:

Hello there,

You still have the Premium subscription - we are not letting NEW
subscribers choose this option just yet. Sorry for any confusion.

Best regards,

Marcus
Virgin Digital

So, they deliberately aren’t letting new customers take the Premium subscription – the system which I am having massive problem with. As far as I’m concerned, that is a tacit admission that the Premium subscription simply doesn’t work. It’s worth noting that my request for an immediate refund of the difference between the two prices was ignored.

I still have a ticket open with their support about the fact that downloads are broken. Not only have I heard nothing from them since sending them some technical details they requested on 28^th December, but they have ignored my subsequent emails asking for an update.

Most seriously, there is no way on the new website to cancel your subscription, nor is this mentioned in any of their somewhat pitiful help pages. I’m assuming that you just have to email them, which is something I’ll be doing very soon if they don’t get their act together.

I checked Google this morning to see if there was any mention of problems on other blogs or website, and was amused to find the blog of the company that developed the site for Virgin. They proudly announced the launch of the new site, and then disabled comments on the post after the only 2 comments they received were complaints about how the download feature didn’t work, and how horrible the site was in general.

While we’re here, I’m going to mention something that makes me wonder whether Virgin Digital have any professionalism at all. Below is the EULA for the subscription manager application that is supposed to keep the licences for my downloads up to date, if only I could download anything at all. This ‘licence’ is simply riddled with completely flippant and in some cases, wholly inappropriate language for what is supposed to be a legal document. I’m sure Virgin think this is hilarious, and it might be excusable if their service actually worked, but in the circumstances it makes the company look like a bunch of amateurs. I’ve coloured the ‘flippant’ sections red, and highlighted the most inappropriate text in yellow.

I’d be curious to know whether this document would actually stand up in court given the blatant disregard for professionalism that it shows.

Recently Virgin moved the bulk of their service (everything except the subscription service) to a browser based system instead of the dedicated player software they used before. They then seemingly abandoned what was left of the old client to work on the new one, and it stopped working once IE7 was launched. After (presumably) enough customers complained, they then U-turned and fixed it. One thing I did spot is that even after it was fixed, they quietly stopped updating the media guide, so to the casual observer it looked like no music had been released for over a month, though recent releases were fully available if you knew what to search for.

On Friday, they finally launched the subscription system on the new website. I say finally not only because it should have launched when the rest of the site launched, but also because they sent out emails announcing that it was live, then suddenly realised it wasn’t live and took the site down for 3 hours to update it. When it came back up, I took a good look over the new system and I’m sorry to report the results were less than satisfying. Roughly 10% of the times that I clicked on a click I got a server error, and when I did get to see the site I wasn’t that impressed.

Things only got worse from there. Right now, this is all you get when visiting:

Guys, this is why you don’t launch a new system on a Friday before a major international holiday. Note also that ‘circumstances’ is spelled incorrectly, such is the rush they are in.

So, what can we expect when it returns? And why has it been taken completely offline?

Wait a second, let’s not even think as far ahead as that. What about right now? What worries me sligthly is that the launch email said that access to Virgin Digital via the old player software – currently the only functioning product – would be withdrawn on the 26^th December. Let’s hope they reconsider that cut-off and that’s it’s not on some timer that no-one has remembered to postpone.

Before I get started, let me say that new new player does have some good things about it. The interface is on the whole bigger than it used to be and as such less fiddly to use, and a bit more intuitive. On the technical side, it finally respects the Windows Media Player options for WMA playback, which for me at least, means that it now plays back on all 4 channels of my soundcard instead of just the front 2. Also, as I quickly found, when it does go wrong it produces readable and useful error messages, which the old player was incredibly bad at.

However, right now, these advantages are seriously outweighed by the problems. The new system has promise, but it also stinks of a system that was pushed out way too early in order to meet an arbitrary corporate deadline. The system simply is not ready, and that is reflected not only in the multitude of problems but confirmed by the fact it is now completely offline over the Christmas break. The sad thing is that the developers will almost certainly take the blame for this, when the real culprit is the person who insisted it be ready in time for Christmas.

The 2 biggest problems I found were these:

1. Frequent ASP server errors. Usually trying again later worked around them, but still a bit of a problem.
2. Downloading subscription tracks is completely broken. It simply doesn’t work. Any attempt to do results in an error message stating:

   Problem with Purchase
   Unfortunately, there was a problem with your purchase.
   Extra Info : Unable to retrieve download url

   I raised a ticket on this problem and it was acknowledged as a known issue.

Those are probably the two that caused the site to be taken offline, and are the ones I expect to be fixed first. However, I have a good number of other issues with the site. Sadly, this is almost certainly not an exclusive list, but given the site was only up for a short time this is what I found during my review.

• Lost functionalityThe simple fact is that the new site does not have some of the basic functionality that the old player has:
  1. The ‘Browse Artist’ and ‘Browse Album’ options don’t exist. In the old player, I can right-click a streaming track in the playlist and select either of these options to view more music by the same artists or that appears on the same album as the track in question. I use these options all the time, and they simply don’t exist in the new web-based player. The closest we now have is a link to the artists page for the currently playing track (not any track in the playlist as before. What’s more, this link does nothing at the moment, and is presumably simply broken.
  2. There is no download manager. The old player would manage my track downloads very nicely, automatically naming them and sorting them into folders according to preferences I specified. The new system simply bungs them all into one big zip file (or at least it will once they get it working) with predefined names that I then have to rename and sort manually. This is a chore, and one I am really not happy about. I can only assume at this point that the server supports download resuming, since I’ve never been able to get a download to start.
  3. The media guide is even less detailed than before. This is actually pretty shocking given that the media guide was pretty spartan before. Maybe they think that every customer knows exactly what they are looking for, but as a subscription customer sold on the premise of being able to explore new music, I’m not happy with this. Once thing I immediately missed was from the ‘New Releases’ list; in the old player there is a button marked ‘More’ which will give me the last 20 tracks featured there before the current list (of only 5-6 tracks) usurped them. This now doesn’t exist, so if I don’t check it as frequently as it gets updated I’ll simply miss new releases. All this without even considering that the HMV media guide features about 50 ‘New Releases’ for a genre at any one time…

  Now, the premise for moving over to the web-based service is that “By moving to a new web-based platform we can continually improve the service and add new features”. Hopefully they’ll start by putting some of the old ones back.

• The search functionality doesn’t work as well as the search in the old software. The problem comes when searching for an artist (or anything for that matter) that has any diacritical mark in the name. “Beyoncé”, for example. In the old player, if I searched for beyonce, it would find her. Now, it does not; in order to find what I’m looking for, I must enter beyoncé, complete with the accent.I can see how this has happened. The developers are based in Luxembourg, where the Swiss-French keyboard layout is typically used, which has accented keys on it. Therefore, it’s simple to enter these characters. However, in the UK and US (the two markets that Virgin Digital operates in) these keys simply aren’t on the keyboard, and most people have absolutely no idea how to enter them (for those wondering, you can either copy them from Character Map or use keyboard shortcuts such as AltGr+e to get an é). Frankly, this is a big problem when you’re operating in English-speaking countries. If I want to search for Beyoncé, Björk, Röyksopp, or anyone else with a non-English character in their name, it’s quite tricky. Plus, any newcomer would have to know that this problem even existed instead of simply thinking that Virgin didn’t carry these artists and giving up.
• On a related note, and a problem which perhaps reveals why the above problem exists, is the first of the website design problems that the current site has. Let’s look quickly at a section of the page for Beyoncé, which I have finally managed to find now I know that the problem is:

  The page title (and URL) for each artist seems to consist solely of a lowercase plain text version of their name. In this case, it’s even worse: the é has been replaced with the numbers 233. This is significant because the é is UTF-8 character code #233. I suspect that what has happened is that when the ‘plain text’ versions of each entry have been created for the database, specifically to work around the above problem by replacing accented characters with plain version, it has screwed up and substituted the numerical code instead. I wasn’t able to test it in time before the site was taken offline, but I’ll bet if I searched for beyonc233 I would have found this page.

  Even once the encoding is sorted, the page title needs to be better than this. It’s a trivial error that detracts from the professionalism of the site. Page titles are not some invisible bit of text that no-one looks at, especially now that we have tabbed browsing in IE7 as well as Firefox. Which brings me onto my next gripe…

• The site doesn’t work in Firefox. Admittedly neither do any of their competitors, but that’s no excuse. Most of the site seems to work OK, but the subscription player displays error messages stating that Internet Explorer is required and doesn’t play any tracks. This isn’t even funny. Just last week, it was reported that Firefox market share in the UK is at 12%. Typically, these are the more tech-savvy users who are more likely to use a service such as Virgin Digital. By not supporting it, you piss off a good chunk of your market, including me. It could be that this problem is unintentional – the site does install a Firefox plugin that certainly implies it should work, but the contradictory error message suggests that Firefox support was perhaps a late decision, and one that obviously wasn’t ready in time, or was withdrawn.Annoying as it is, this isn’t the end of the world. I was happy using an entirely separate application for Virgin Digital before, and so it doesn’t kill me to have to launch IE to use it now. However, it does fly in the face of why they are moving to a web-based service in the first place; I still can’t use my regular browser.
• Back to the subject of page design. The actual site design itself is pretty nice, but I do have a complaint; there’s simply not enough bloody room on the page for actual content. There are a few things I think they’ve done wrong here.
  1. Fixed page width.I didn’t like fixed page widths in 1995 when I started using the internet and I don’t like them now, especially since I use an above average screen resolution. The page a fixed size (966px wide) that assumes you are using a 1024×768 screen resolution. If you use something higher, you just get blank space at the sides of the page. That’s blank space that I could be using to read the damned content. I didn’t buy a big monitor for nothing.

     I can understand why they’ve done it. Designing a resizeable page layout is harder than making a fixed one, but that’s not an excuse. It’s just a sign of laziness. I don’t see HMV using a fixed page width, a competitor site which has a significantly richer media guide, I might add. However, this would not be so bad if not for the rest of the problems…

     Since they are obviously aiming for monitors using 1024×768, let’s take a look at what the page looks like at that size, in IE7, with the Luna theme, which is of course what the default settings are in XP.

     

  2. The Shopping Basket is too damned big.At this size, the available height for the page in Internet Explorer is 620px. The Shopping Basket, not including the fade line, covers 100px of that, or 16%. As you can see, this isn’t something that appears at the bottom of the page after all the content; it stays on the screen as you scroll up and down. Sure, the menu and header on the page is pretty huge too, but that at least disappears when I scroll down. Screen real estate is precious enough without chopping off nearly a sixth of it for what is essentially an empty space waiting to be filled. Every other e-commerce site I’ve ever used is quite content with putting the shopping basket at the side, or at the top. Why have this huge ‘drag stuff here’ box anyway? Are they afraid that people won’t work out that the yellow ‘Buy’ button next to every track and album will allow them to buy it?

     The simplest solution is to make the basket hideable, much like the new user instruction panel on the home page of the site. Really though, it should be smaller, and at the top of the page somewhere. The time for innovation in e-commerce design was about 3 years ago, guys; stop trying to reinvent the damn thing and look at what works. Amazon may think they have a patent on their e-commerce design but there’s a reason everyone copies it.

  3. The advert is also too big.It’s not the advert itself which annoys me, which is somewhat surprising when you consider that as a subscriber I am paying them money just to look at the site. Part of me thinks I shouldn’t be seeing an advert at all; this isn’t some free ad-supported service on Geocities. However, you could very well consider the entire site as one giant advertisement, and when it comes down to it, I was actually quite interested to see that the V for Vendetta DVD was on sale because it’s a good film that I actually do want to own on DVD. I doubt it was that precisely targeted, but as long as ads on the site remain relevant to me I don’t have a huge problem with them. What I do dislike is that fact that the ad takes up so much room. Not content with limiting me to a fixed width, they then take up over 200px of that (over 20%!) with an advert, when that space could be used to used to show me the actual content I came to the site for. What worse is that the space below the ad is just a completely blank space; the page content doesn’t wrap around below it.

     The ads need to be be about a quarter of the size they are now, and not further limit the available width for the real content. This is basic, amateur stuff we’re dealing with here.

  4. Some of the interface is actually too small.Tragically, given the overall propensity for enlarging the interface, some of the text is almost to small to read. Take a look in the image above at some of the text in the shopping basket, for example. I thought the blurriness was due to ClearType’s anti-aliasing at first, but when I compared it without ClearType it was actually worse. Click the image here to see it at 200% zoom for comparison:

     

I’ve been deliberately quite critical here since Virgin Digital, unlike Napster, has no forum for feedback on the service. Also, they’ve taken a big gamble by completely replacing a working and full-featured program with something completely new. It’s important to note though that for every single thing I’ve mentioned here, I’ve suggested a way to fix it, and in most cases they are easy fixes. I really hope they can get some (preferably all) of this stuff sorted out soon. The new Virgin Digital service has the potential not only to knock its current competitors down but also potentially see off competition from iTunes if they ever enter the subscription market. Right now, they aren’t in that strong a position. It won’t take much actual work to put them there, but it will require stronger decisions about the system’s development than they are apparently taking at the moment. The should start by insisting on more extensive testing, and not be afraid to say ‘no’ to the marketing idiots who insist on meeting arbitrary deadlines, no matter the cost. Hopefully they’ll learn from the current problems that sometimes the cost is too high.

One of their CS representatives once reminded me that Virgin Digital is still a young branch of the Virgin Group. Perhaps their first step should be to get some more seasoned web consultants on board to help them avoid the silly mistakes they are falling into right now.

Well, the auto-update didn’t work as it failed to find the update file on the server – obviously still a few glitches to iron out – but with the aid of Wireshark, the Google cache, and some expert sleuthing, I was able to work out where they were keeping the full installer for the new version. Installed it, and everything is working again! Fantastic. I foresee a lot of music downloading this evening.

After trying to use the HMV software for just a few days, going back to Virgin was like an old friend returning from a long absence.

The Jay, he is happy again.

You may remember me bemoaning the fact that Virgin Digital broke quite spectacularly last month after upgrading to IE7 due to their software being incompatible with the new version. However, you probably missed that the Virgin CS rep I originally berated actually turned up posting on my journal, and eventually gave me a 7-day estimate for the problems to be resolved.

Well, I wasn’t really that surprised when day 7 (working days or otherwise) came and went without the software being fixed, and so once again I went looking at the competition. It hasn’t taken me long to realise why I went with Virgin in the first place; that being that the only two viable competitors in the market both suck.

Napster has an interface that only a programmer would devise. The database search is fine if you know exactly what you’re looking for, but if you’re looking for something new, their ‘music guide’ is a pitiful, crippled tool. If I want to look at new releases, I can’t even filter by genre, which is almost useless. If I search by genre in the clunky, drill-down style database search, the closest I can get to ‘New Releases’ is the ‘Recently added’ category, which if course bares absolutely no relation to a list of recent releases since they add old songs to the database all the time. I was also disgusted to find Michael Jackson at the top of the “Dance/Electronica” category, but that’s a separate rant.

HMV Digital does much better with their music guide – I’d even go so far as to say it is better than the Virgin one; it has a lot more depth to it, and seems to show me a more complete list of new releases in each genre instead of the somewhat paltry, presumably hand-picked selection I see on Virgin. Both services source their music from MusicNet, so their catalogues are essentially identical, just the way they are presented and who charges you differs. You wouldn’t think that makes a big difference, but it does.

The HMV player lacks basic functionality that I use all the time with Virgin. If I want to stream a track from the store, I can’t queue it up in the playlist; I have to listen to it straight away. Once the track has interrupted my playlist, if I have the gall to browse away from the album page, I can’t quickly go back to find the other tracks from the album. In Virgin Digital, I could simply right click the track in the playlist and select Browse Album (or Brose Artist) to find related tracks. In HMV Digital, all I get is “More by this artist”, which 1. returns any track with the artists name in the title, even if it’s not by them, and 2. doesn’t fucking work if the track is a collaboration of 2 or more artists.

When I first raised the issue with Virgin about the incompatibility with IE7, they suggested rolling back to IE6. Faced with the rubbish on offer from HMV and Napster, it’s almost worth it, but the fact that I work in IT and appreciate what an arrogant suggestion that really is means I’m still not going to. I should not have to bend over backwards to give them my money.

Virgin really had their user interface down, and the music guide had the basics all there, even if it could be a bit more in-depth. Now it’s broken and may not be fixed until the end of the year, if ever (right now they seem so uncommitted to the product that I wouldn’t be surprised if it simply disappeared). This time last year I asked why I couldn’t find a music download service that wasn’t awful. Virgin eventually won me over, and now through their own ineptitude they’ve taken it away, the bastards. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; if iTunes launched a subscription service they would kill the competition dead, and right now I think they’d deserve it.

The worst thing is that for the last year I’ve had to weather the incredulous comments of anyone I tell about this, who all ask why I don’t just illegally download music from Kazaa or Limewire or whatever for free. You know what? It would be a lot less fucking hassle. I’ve cancelled my Virgin Digital subscription but have kept the player software installed so I can at least check up on whether they ever fix it. At least I’ll have lots to listen to over Christmas if they do fix it, but I’m not holding my breath.

I get about 5 of these, with varying messages, on every page, regardless of whether I click Yes or No. After reinstalling Virgin Digital for good measure, I contacted their tech support. Somewhat farcically, immediately after clicking the Submit button on the tech support form (which is built into the application), the application crashed. It was only 10 minutes later when I got the automated response via email that I even knew for sure whether the support request had been sent.

Today, I got a real response to the problem:

Are you kidding me? Your excuse is that IE7 was released early and you just weren’t ready for it?

Even if that were true (which it isn’t, as the release was announced by Microsoft weeks in advance), the public Beta 2 version was released in April. You had six months to get ready. Six. Count them.

You also lose 20 points for ending every sentence with an exclamation point. I can only hope that English is not ‘Axel’s’ first language, because the alternative is that he is a moron.

Not being ready for the latest version of the most used browser on the planet, and the core product supporting your service, is simply incompetent. It’s worth noting that Virgin’s 2 biggest competitors that use the same technology (Napster and HMV Digital) have no such problems with their services (I know, because I checked). The only reason I haven’t cancelled my Virgin account already is that they claim it will all be fixed by next week. The ‘all new’ site had better have some UI improvements along with it, or I’ll be taking my business elsewhere.

In case you’ve wisely forgotten my previous rant, this is essentially music rental; if I stop paying the subs, any music I download stops playing at the end of the month. The poor quality I previously bemoaned on Napster was, it seems, not down to the encoding method, but down to Napster’s retrograde encoder, since Virgin use the exact same format and their’s actually does sound better. Who would have guessed their advertising was actually true?

They have, however, shown varying levels of competence on other fronts. When I first signed up they actually managed to bill me twice according to their own records, and three times according to Barclaycard, but they have now refunded the extra two charges. Amusingly, my Virgin account history now claims I’ve never paid them a penny, yet they let me use the service anyway, since I have actually paid.

Also, when I first installed their software, downloading just didn’t work at all – tracks in the download queue would just get stuck and never finish. I emailed the tech support, but after a few hours got bored of waiting and researched the problem myself, and had it fixed in about 30mins. Out of curiosity I let them believe it still wasn’t working to see how long it would take them to reach the solution I had reached.

The answer: 9 days.

In all fairness, they did respond with the exact fix (which was pretty obscure) on their second email to me, but taking 9 days to do so would have pissed me off if I had actually been unable to use the service all that time.

Apart from that, the software is pretty good; definitely more polished and easier to use than the Napster client, and with far fewer bugs. Music selection is about the same as far as I can tell. All said, I’m pretty happy with it, and with Elizabeth using it to fill her Zen Micro up with music too, I think I’ll stick with it for now at least.

So far I’ve looked at Napster, HMV Digital, and Virgin Digital, and they all use 128k WMA. Now I’ve listened to music at this quality, and it sucks. I don’t care what their PR monkeys say, I can hear a substantial quality loss at this bitrate. Maybe I have better speakers than most, or maybe I can just hear better than most people, but nonetheless, it’s frustrating that nobody offers a higher quality service. I’d even be willing to pay more for it. How they have the gall to call it ‘near-CD quality’ is truly astounding.

Don’t even talk to me about iTunes. I haven’t tested the quality of their service, partly because I hate Apple and their elitist, non-compatible, and frankly deluded, ‘Apple is the best’ company design mantra. Even if I didn’t, their service is pay-per-track only. The services above use what is essentially a music rental business model; you can download and listen to as much as you like, but only as long as you keep paying your single monthly fee. I want that kind of service. I want to try out different music without buying it and finding out that it’s tripe, and I don’t want stupid 30-sec previews. Whenever I tell people this they seem astounded by the fact that not actually owning the music doesn’t bother me. “But you’d lose all the music when you stopped subscribing!” they cry. These same people are however quite happy to pay out a monthly fee for 50+ channels of TV they don’t even watch.

I don’t know if iTunes quality is any better, but if it is, and if iTunes launched a subscription service, I’d try it, even though it would mean sacrificing my principles by doing so. That’s how irritating this whole thing is.