RutunesDigital Music, Computers, Internet…

MP3Sale have set-up an interesting Valentine’s Day Promotion.

As always with MP3Sale there is no deadline date, but will most likely last for the next couple of days.

Make a gift for your friends!
Add to your account €20, €30 or €50 with cards and get special Bonus code for 220, 330 or 550 FREE DOWNLOADS that you can send to your friend as a gift.

See Promotion Details

The Great Black Friday Week MP3Sale Offer Has Started!

For only a week starting today, MP3Sale will be giving 100% bonus on all refills.

For e.g.
€20 (+ €20 FREE)
€30 (+ €30 FREE)
€50 (+ €50 FREE)

These are the times to stock up on credit, as you can save a killing.

This link will take you direct to the ‘Add to balance’ page: http://www.aom3.org/mp3sale

Enjoy!

While I have a love-hate relationship with MP3Fiesta, they seem to continously pushing the boundry with me. And recently I have decided to temporariliy stop using them altogether and give my money to a different a shop. The lack of support and poor payment method are the main factors for MP3Fiesta losing me as a customer. If you have any problems refilling your account for whatever reason at any shop, be sure to check out this thread at aom3, where members (including myself) have recommended music shops based on their payment method record and it’s a good little find, for people who regularly use these shops.

As taken from this aom3 thread, here are this months music shop bonus offers.

MP3Fiesta.com
Recommend-a-friend referral scheme. Get a friend to sign up an account via your url and you will get a $50 bonus on your own balance. Click here.

$100 USD + 25% Bonus ($25 For Free)
$50 USD + 20% Bonus ($10 For Free)
$40 USD + 15% Bonus ($6 For Free)
$30 USD + 10% Bonus ($3 For Free)

MP3sale.ru
€30 (+ €10 FREE)
€50 (+ €50 FREE)
€100 (+ €50 FREE)

MusicMP3.ru (e-gold)
€29.9 + 10% Bonus (€3 FOR FREE)
€39.9 + 15% Bonus (€6 FOR FREE)
€49.9 + 20% Bonus (€10 FOR FREE)

MP3skyline.com / MP3xclusive.com
$45 USD + 33% Bonus ($15 For Free)
$35 USD + 15% Bonus ($5 For Free)

GoMusic.ru
75 USD +10% bonus
90 USD +15% bonus
120 USD +20% bonus

Legalsounds
USD $39 and get 50 free songs
USD $50 and get 80 free songs
USD $100 and get 200 free songs

I needed a change from the usual sluggish-web-based message support system that a lot of music shops offer (no need to mention names) and decided to request my music from MP3sale, as they didn’t initially have what I wanted. Posted on their music request forum and got the answer and the music I wanted within 24 hours. Exactly what customer service should be.

Within this time where anyone can start an online music shop (as long as it is in the right country), it seems basic business practice is being forgotten or simply thrown out the window due to laziness. While customer service maybe the most tedious and demanding area of running a shop, it also your No.1 tool to in getting those 1-time-customers coming back to your site. So I will take this time in saying ‘well-done’ to MP3Sale.

[MP3sale]

With iTunes being the market leader in digital music shops and loved by many, it goes without saying that iTunes has its fair amount of critics. With its high price structure, stubborn software functionality and presumptuous product design, people cannot justify paying a high price for music bundled with restrictions.

So many digital music shoppers are turning to other sources, specifically Russian and eastern European based online digital music shops. Countries such as Russian And Ukraine have copyright laws that are not updated to cover digital media, allowing many digital shops a foundation for selling music at ridiculously low prices without any restrictions. It’s a strong consumer demand that Apple chooses ignores as long as it continues to print money and maintain a dominant share of the market.

But it won’t be long till many of these European shops gain more exposure and attract more users. Inevitably it was also get unfavourable legal attention from western countries. If the growth trend continues, three speculative outcomes are likely to happen.
1. Music industry representative organisations will take legal action and eventually a case will follow through in stating the legality of these shops. Even after all the commotion and media hype of allofmp3.com, still no jurisdiction has simply stated whether these music digital shops are legal.
2. These shops continue to operate, while American and other western countries continue to bully credit card companies, e.g. Visa (an American company) into banning transactions on these shops.
3. An unlikely outcome, but most favourable among everyone, Other drm-free music shops gain enough market share to scare Apple into making changes. Apple is will be forced to listen to what the consumer wants and drop their controlling ways, changing their business model to compete with eastern European music shops.

So just how good, or bad are these Eastern-European music shops? Here is a small list of the cheapest digital music shops on the internet.

1. Legalsounds.com
Price per Track: $0.09
Catalogue: n/a
Other Shops of Similar Price: none

2. Iomoio.com
Price per Track: $0.10
Catalogue: 900,000+ songs
Other Shops of Similar Price: none

3. Soundsbox.com
Price per Track: $0.14
Catalogue: n/a
Other Shops of Similar Price: Millisong.com

4. Lavamus.com
Price per Track: $0.15
Catalogue: 2,500,000+ Songs
Other Shops of Similar Price: MusicMP3.ru, MP3VA.com, MP3.ua

5. MP3sale.ru
Price per Track: $0.16
Catalogue: 1,900,000+ songs
Other Shops of Similar Price: none

# iTunes Music Store
Price per Track - $0.99
Catalogue - 8,000,000+ songs

Many people have emailed me asking where the reviews are for music shops such as MP3Sale and MP3Fiesta. As Rutunes is now a blog, all the original hand-written reviews have now been moved to Aom3.org, the community site for digital music shops as well as a resource hot-spot for digital music buying.

So consider this post as a shout-out for the information that aom3 has to offer.

The music shop reviews section in aom3 offers some truely fantastic extensive reviews on music shops, written by members of aom3.The reviews section is very helpful and you can see what ratings members of aom3 have given to various shops.

Highlighted Reviews
MP3Sale review
MP3Fiesta review
Lavamus review
Legalsounds review

[Aom3 Music Shop Reviews]

Aom3 has also put up a detailed comparison table for all music shops, where you can sort shops by price, features, payment options etc.. Very helpful when you want to find a shop with a specific payment option, e.g. paypal.
[Aom3 Comparison Table]

As well as the strong community that powers aom3.org, there is a freebies mailing list, that sends out free gift certificates and information on bonues updates for various shops. Aom3 have already achieved in sending out 500+ free gift certificates for Lavamus.com. Its free to sign up and your email address will not be shared out to any 3rd party orgnisation.
[Aom3 Freebie Mailing List]

So these are just a few gems on what Aom3 has to offer. Feel free to check it out.

[Aom3.org Forums]

As I am currently on holiday, I am a bit slow in getting the latest news out. It looks like MP3sale are keep customers very happy with their 100% balance-bonus activation code, which basically means a doubled value of your balance with the help of a gift code. Instructions below:

Bonus code can be activated by ANY user, registered prior to July, 1st.
You can activate this bonus code only once within one month, starting from today. (So, the last day you’ll be able to activate it - will be 21, August 2008)
In case, if your current balance is lower than your last real deposit - you’ll recieve bonus equal to your last deposit.

After activation of this bonus code, your balance will be doubled up.

The bonus code is DOUBLE

You can activate it from “Add To Balance -> Bonus Code/Pin Code activation” - just enter “Double” in the “code” form and press “Continue”. Your balance will be updated within 5-10 minutes.

What will be the result of this for the business of MP3sale? Well just from using common sense, customers prior to july are very unlikely to make another deposit for sometime after using the bonus code, unless MP3Sale has statistics showing that those customers are regular downloaders who are likely to do a very large top-up, preventing a top-up dry period. The other result is the exposure and building of their brand image. This compensation deal has shown MP3sale cares about their customers enough to offer a very generous bonus top-up and I wouldn’t be surprised if people forgot about MP3sale’s previous downtime troubles anytime soon.

Saying all that, I would like to thank MP3sale for my new very high €xxx balance.

[MP3sale]

Despite free education, a free national health service and one of the best government tolerability towards immigrants in the world, living the UK isn’t that great. More importantly , UK has poor Internet speeds compared to Eastern Asian countries,  late in getting the latest movies, music and technology. But one thing UK people are happy about, is the weakening dollar. With everyone flocking to American shopping websites and eBay USA, it means UK people are happy to enjoy buying products from USA when the price is much lower than in the UK.

This also applies to digital music shops. At the lowest price of $0.09 per track offered by LegalSounds, that means (approx) £0.045 for UK customers. At an average of 12 tracks per album, it comes to £0.54 per album. Play.com offers albums at around £6.99 each, so its common for UK customers to be pleased to live in the UK for once, as the find their digital music from shops like MP3Sale, Legalsounds, MP3Fiesta etc..

It seems as if MP3sale team is taking all the necessary stops to regain their customers confidence, as they announced yesterday that they plan to offer another compensation deal to their members

It was nearly one month ago since MP3sale offered compensation for the downtime of their service, which was due a to hard-hitting server failure. But since then, restoration still continues and customers are starting to see a glimpse of favorite music shop coming back to life. Most of MP3sale.ru is functional, except for .zip feature which is still under-going heavy development.

To calm much of the anger expressed by their customers on the forums, they have decided to offer another compensation deal, despite the poorly phrased announcement, it has cheered up a lot of the customers and regained much trust. The new compensation deal is likely to be confirmed within the new fey days.  Details here:

Gift Certificates will be given to each MP3sale customer, which will double your current balance up to the point of activation. The gift certificates, I believe, are valid for 1month, so you could top up your account as much as possible within the month and then use the gift certificate to double it?
For customers who purchased money during the recent restoration period, but were unable to download music, their case will be individually dealt, but most probably only if the customer comes forward first and will most likely have their last deposit (with bonus) doubled.

All in all, you can’t blame MP3sale for trying to please everyone and they’ve done a pretty good job of it. I predict they are going to lose fair bit of money in the beginning, but will gain back the respect for their shop and will thus continue to thrive.

[Unofficial MP3sale Forums] via [MP3sale]