Angela pegged me to a music promotion on Dose.ca where you can get 15 tracks from some pretty decent bands for the low low cost of free – not even an email opt-in required.
Back when Dose launched in 2005, it had one of the only online music stores in the country, which was kind of nifty as an add-on to the site and not a standalone store – if memory serves, Puretracks was the largest, with iTunes having just opened their Canadian store the past December. I worked (for a vendor) on the Dose music store, which, like PureTracks at the time, used Microsoft DRM but apparently the purchase process was a little more seamless, or so I’d heard (in the crush of launch, I don’t think I so much as sketched what the music store pages were going to look like, let alone sampled the competition – the site just evolved as a series of classic ASP scripts with some hand-coded (in Notepad, because I didn’t have a VS2003 license) ASP.NET 1.1 to make a few things easier.
Anyway, the Dose store did a few promotional giveaways in the summer of 2005 where you could get a free track each week in exchange for giving your email address to the sponsor (possibly SnapTax and then Virgin Mobile, but don’t quote me.) It was a little cumbersome; I think you had to confirm your email to get a coupon which you could then use to get a free track in the store, but there weren’t any user accounts like in iTunes, so you still had to fill out some forms for the DRM to take hold. This is all from memory. I suspect the DRM servers are still running (it was a 3rd party service that seems to still have clients) so the recipients of those tracks have so far dodged the “Plays for Sure – until we stop it” mess that went down a few years back.
That was then. Last night I clicked a link, then a button, and then entered my iTunes password, and 15 tracks started downloading, which are now fuelling my morning work session. And I haven’t kept up on this stuff, but I believe they’re DRM-free.
5 years took us this far. Yes, it’s still very hard to “just start” a music store with major label approval, and things have consolidated to an even larger degree, but it’s progress just the same, and record labels are getting better at music promotions as well. And hey, if I want to hear a particular song these days without actually downloading it, I can probably find it on YouTube – which also launched in early 2005.
Looking back like this helps every once in a while, both to get excited about what’s next and to remember that companies need to be constantly moving forward – the user experience of 5 years ago would get you laughed off the stage of any DemoCamp today, so what’s it going to be like 3, 6, or 18 months from now?
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