Business Incompetence

Just encountered one of my biggest business peeves, so please excuse the rant.

It amazes me how some businesses can just utterly ignore the most basic parts of their service. I am an eMusic subscriber. It is Tuesday, when new releases come out. It is nearly noon on the west coast, and getting close to 3pm on the east coast. They do not have the new Springsteen album available for purchase yet. The artist page does have a handy feature where it automatically posts the most recent tweets relating to that artist, and the newest tweet is a link to buy the album on iTunes. So, if I go to the Springsteen page on eMusic I can't buy his new album, but they do provide me with a link to buy it through their competitor, who has had it available for hours. Brilliant.

Seriously, how does a business like this think it will stay afloat? People want to buy things like a new Bruce Springsteen album as soon as it's available. If you do not make it available, they will buy it somewhere else. I used to run into this at Borders -- I would go in looking for the new book by one of my favorite authors, and they would tell me they think it's still in the boxes in the back room. Barnes and Noble would invariably have it on the shelf. A few years later, Borders is dead and Barnes and Noble is still around.

OK, rant over. Thank you.

 

Springsteen doesn't need any more money. Today I went to look for concert tickets to see him later this month; $100 for the worst seat in the house. No, thanks.

 

EMusic seems to have moved in a direction to make itself a lot more competitive over the past years but...yeah. It still ain't as user-friendly as something like ITunes when it comes to new releases. I look at it as one of the trade-offs for using it as opposed to another music downloading service. It still has enough benefits to keep me as a subscriber, though I admit it'd be the first thing on the chopping block if I were to need to trim my monthly budget again.