It just didn’t cliq
So, the buy music you hear on the radio service has bitten the dust. Oh shock horror! You do sometimes wonder if the people who design these things actually think about how people use technology in the real world. James Cridland reckons it might have worked better if you could have done stuff other than purely buying tracks but he misses the point. Who’s gonna sit there racking up WAP charges and running down their battery (because it needs a live data connection) staring at a mobile application showing limited infrequently updated information. People are far more likely to be reading a paper, doing some work or suchlike whilst listening.
Take now for instance. You’re sitting here reading this, probably on a computer, maybe with radio in the background. I’ve listening through wifi in the garden atm, clearly one of those ‘trendy’ types who the analysts say will drive future radio listening. Currently I have the Passion Radio webplayer on. They even have a bar saying what’s playing. But its one of those windows which just gets hidden behind the regular browser, so its instantly lost the idle curiosity factor for who’s singing most songs. Secondly, its broken, its been saying Beyonce is playing for 20 minutes now. Thirdly, even if it wasn’t and I could buy the track, there’s no link on the player to buy the tune. So, I’m more than likely to just load up itunes and order it directly, leaving them with zero commission from the sale. Why can’t they just have a web toolbar you can load, it would a link to the stream (meaning I listen more), show what’s playing (to which I’d probably pay more attention) and you could have direct links to itunes, napster, whatever, to make money from the sales. Seems obvious to me. They could even have ‘ilike’ buttons that save the songs you like so you can come back and order a few in one go. Shazam saves your tags like this, so it can’t be rocket science.
Another point, just browsing cliq’s website (still live btw) I noticed that Heart London was amongst the stations using it. But I regularly listen to Heart and never heard Cliq promoted once. No-one it died if even the partner stations didn’t bother to promote it.
Hrmph. Not sure I made a point, really, around Cliq. I’m just saying that radio is more than just music.
As you eloquently point out, there are lots of different ways to purchase music. I certainly don’t want Windows Media files with Content Restriction And Protection in them; I can’t play cr&p files on the iPhone, nor on the music computer in the living room. And I also believe that “right now” is not necessarily the right time to buy music; I’d like to take a note of things, please, and buy when I want to. It would be nice if there was something on my radio which said “hey, take a note of this song for later!” or even “email the title of this song to me for later”.
Incidentally, I do most of my RSS reading on my iPhone, which has unlimited data (if I’m not on wifi). And funnily enough, Virgin Radio (where I worked a while back) had a toolbar in… 2004. And it was quite popular. No new ideas in radio, eh?!
Nobody likes DRM but that’s a different argument. The ilike button or something similar (like the Shazam application which keeps a list of tunes you tagged) is an obvious way of keeping track of tunes you like. Those with unlimited data plans are still in the minority and keeping long continual connections is a surefire way of draining a phone battery down.
Had a quick look at the toolbar, it doesn’t show what’s playing or seem to have any direct links to buy the currently playing track; not sure it really proves your point
[...] It just didn’t cliq [dodgy reception]Mystery blogger tells me I "missed the point". Pah. As if I'd *ever* do that. Cough. [...]
A trawl around the web, June 4th to June 25th - blog - James Cridland said this on June 26, 2008 at 12:56 am