Customer service
Clearly the regular posting is off to a slow start, but I swear I am trying, haha 
So here’s a short note about customer service (and I guess it’s also about LEGAL MP3 downloads). Now, given that the price difference between the regular disc and the MP3 album is often small and that I play discs in my car, I usually go for the disc instead of the MP3 (and rip it myself to play it on my computer and throw the CD in the car collection). But, I did make an exception twice.
First time I bought an MP3 album from Amazon, all was good. I liked the great quality, it was DRM free, so thumbs up for Amazon, thumbs down for iTunes. The second time I bought from Amazon, which was about a week back, things didn’t go so well. The download went good, but then the tracks were skipping (I’m guessing the original CD they were ripped from was dirty or scratched). So in other words, another small but terribly annoying problem, just as I had previously with iTunes. Now here’s the difference. When my iTunes album was messed up, I tried to contact them about it and I never heard back. This small failure in customer service ensured that I will never buy a track from iTunes again. On the other hand, Amazon responded fantastically fast (I think in less than two hours every time I wrote to them), were very polite and offered me a whole bunch of solutions. Now, the solutions themselves looked as if an automatic answering system spit them out because they were all solutions for download problems instead of messed up tracks, but with a service as big as Amazon, some preset answers don’t surprise me much, you have to keep things going, I can understand that – even if it doesn’t make me very happy. Eventually, unable to get things figured out, I requested a refund and again, very quickly, I received a confirmation that I will get refunded AND I was invited to try and get the MP3 album again in a few days, after they try and get a corrected version up (finally an acknowledgment of the real problem).
Now sure, I am still upset that the whole thing didn’t work right and now I have to get the disc instead and wait for it to be mailed and all, but their responsive customer service made me happy. Yes, I will think twice before buying an MP3 album again, but I might nonetheless. And I will definitely still consider Amazon my number one choice for Internet purchases as long as they keep up the good work like this. Everybody makes mistakes and that’s normal. It’s how you react to those mistakes that sets the difference, especially when it comes to mistakes towards your customers.
A little note here: the OVERALL quality of legal MP3 sales has got to go up, otherwise you will never convince people to stop doing it illegaly. If you download an album illegaly and it’s messed up, you don’t lose a cent, but when you start paying for it, you have some expectations and if those are not met, ethics alone will not keep people on the right track. Actually, they probably will increase the popularity of illegal solutions if anything.
Just in case anyone’s curios, this is the album I am trying to get. I highly recommend it: Bach:Concertos
Getting serious?
I never think of myself as a blogger. I don’t write often, I rarely write about things that interest more than a select few and I don’t do it in a very original manner. But I enjoy this and changes in my life have all been reflected in this blog as it bounced between being a photo, tech and purely personal blog. Further more, one of the pieces of unsolicited advice that I often give people is: “no matter what you do, put passion in it and thrive to at least do the best you can”. So what does that mean?
First of all, I will attempt to add some structure and dedication here and actually post regularly and put a little bit more work in what I write. I would like to stress the word attempt since I got no idea whether or not this will actually work out as I want it. But this blog deserves a bit more work. At the end of last summer I decided to split my public online publishing activity into three components: this blog was going to remain the main component, but it was going to suffer some modifications to remove the very personal things out of it, give it a more presentable view and this has been mostly succesful, I should say. The second was to create a private forum for myself and very close friends that I had difficulty keeping in touch with and that was done shortly and has been going very well also. The third component which was also the least important has actually been a failed attempt and I will not spend more time here on it, I will just say that the need for it was easily covered between the previous two, as I realized some time later. So as it is, this remains the single public publishing online spot I work with and I feel it merits some more work and I will try to get on that.
Second, althought I am still debating exactly what the best manner to go about this is, I will look into adding more categories and variety to the blog. I do a lot more things every day than criticize others, look back at good memories and listen to music. There is a lot I can share with the world (whether “the world” actually wants to read it or not is a different story) and I think I should at least try. More on that soon.
Third, I started out on the wrong foot since this post is one day late according to my own personal schedule, but even more of a reason to catch up! Stay tuned, I hope you’ll be getting more updates on your RSS feeds from me very soon!
