A good e-music shop generates satisfied customers

December 29, 2006 on 3:10 pm | In Computing |

Vowe repeatedly states “DRM is bad for the customer” for good reasons. Well, I have found the first (partially) DRM free store that fits my needs and I am finally a happy customer again.

An article in the Tagesanzeiger titled “Konkurrenz für iTunes aus der Innerschweiz” brought me to the webportal of soundmedia.ch. On the first look soundmedia isn’t different from any other online music store, but it has two important features:

• an extensive collection of Swiss music
• most Swiss music is available as a DRM free MP3 download

Digging through CD stores in search for Swiss music can be quite a hassle as they throw first all that retarded music at you when wandering through the store. Furthermore, the market is too small to find anything but the most selling Swiss titles in the big shops like Apples iTunes music store. Plus in the iTunes music store it’s DRM protected so I have to copy it to a CD first and then rip it back into my iTunes library causing all my online purchases to be stored twice on my harddisk - after all I have to keep the DRMed file to have a proof of purchase.

So there’s a niche where soundmedia.ch comes in with a refreshing concept. They have a special section for Swiss artists (check the red area in the navigation to the left) and inform you at a glance about the file format your download comes in. If it’s an MP3 the only thing left to worry about is to pay the same price as you would in the iTunes music store and off you go to the downloads section. The doenloaded MP3 files neatly integrate into your iTunes library, the album cover art is right there, and you can copy it as many times as you want to your MP3 player, home music server, CD burner etc. My subwoover hasn’t been wooving so happily for quite a long time.

My first soundmedia.ch purchase was Famara’s album Famasound that I have been looking for ever since I heard a song on Swiss radio. Well, a couple mouseclicks later I am enjoying homemade Caribbean style music in the middle of winter.