Customer wants to download music and copy it to CD (for listening in the car and at work).

He doesn’t mind paying for the online music (but is not good at computers). So I do the right thing and look at some music sites. I’ve never looked at the music websites before, but it shouldn’t be too hard.

I’ve heard that allofmp3.com is reasonably priced, so I connect, register, then try to add money to the newly created account… but it seems that allofmp3 no longer supports visa and mastercard payments… OK, scrap allofmp3.

Lets take a look at itunes. After wandering around the website, I start to suspect that I need to download and install the itunes player to the pc… The website is not laided out very clearly, and the terminology used doesn’t make it any easier for an new visitor (even an “experienced one like me”).

Once the itunes player is installed and running, we try to download some music, and we are finally redirected to a setup your account web page.

Once that is done, we get sent to a topup your account page… After filling in the CC details, we can finally download a song.

I download a test song, then play it… so far so good.

Now to copy it to CD… Hmm how do I do that? I spend 10 minutes looking, but the closest I get is a backup to CD (but its not in music CD format, so its useless to my customer.

Ok, I can’t afford to waste any more time on this. Scrap itunes.

I’ve tried to do the right thing. But there are too many roadblocks.

Lets look at emule. I download and install and run emule in 5 minutes. During the download, I tell the customer that downloading songs that you don’t already have, is illegal. I will only show him how to use emule as long as he agrees to only download music he has already paid for either via itunes, or via a conventional CD. He agrees.

I spend another 2 minutes configuring emule, connecting to the P2P network, search for (and find) an MP3 song.

Another 10 minutes downloading the song.

Another 2 minutes burning the song to CD using nero (written in music CD format).

And hey presto, my customer now has a working music CD in less than 20 Minutes.

Now, if it were possible to pay to download and record music this easily, I would have done it.

I reckon itunes is heavily geared towards the ipod generation. This leaves many people in the 30+ age group, who are not interested / capable of using ipods, and who cannot use itunes to burn CDs.

Now, someone might pipe up and say “but hey, its easy to make a music CD from itunes”… But if I couldn’t figure out how to do it, then I’d say many people will be in the same boat as me.

So my message to the music / video industries is: if you don’t change (and change fast), you will become obsolete (and a laughing stock too!)… You are already 5 years behind the times… and your time is running out.