text goes ... er...

The more observant amongst Sandlines’ readership may have noticed that I’ve mentioned a band from Glasgow, called Glasvegas, a couple of times. You may not be amazed to learn, then, that I signed up for their email communications.

I think there must be something about music companies and their approach to email that just misses the point: this email is from Sony subsidiary, Columbia Records, but shows many of the same problems I saw a few years back from one of the other majors (who’ll remain nameless… for now).

In common with a lot of emails from this industry, there is a lot of reliance on images to convey the message of the email. This is fine until you realise that the default for so many email accounts to keep images turned off by default.

Never mind, I turned images on - after all, I want to see what they have to say.

Oh.

They’ve done the old black-text-on-a-black-background trick. I suspect they planned to do white text on black, but of course testing the outcome in the various email clients is just such a lot of work…

As Nate Elliott from JupiterResearch (before being swallowed by Forrester) said at my Advanced Email Strategies conference last year, “… (email marketers)… are Marketers without Images”. Seems Columbia went one better - marketers without images OR words.

Tags: email, glasvegas, images, music

I wrote earlier about Universal leaping whole-heartedly into the fray with a huge catalogue of artists now available in MP3 format. Now Sony have leaped into action as well. OK - so leapt is perhaps an overstatement… the new Glasvegas album is up on 7Digital today (a week or so later than on iTunes) in glorious 320 kbps MP3 format. There seem to be a few other back catalogue items in there too, but I’ve not done a thorough check and it seems patchy rather than as enthusiastic as Universal, Warners and EMI (in reverse order of committing) are today.

BUT, I’m genuinely excited that we may be seeing the end of ridiculously un-customer friendly DRM policies in the sale of music. Who knows, if they get round to TELLING people they’re doing this, maybe their sales might even increase a little…. I’ve long believed one of the reasons that *some* people download, um, illegally is because DRM makes life so blinking difficult to enjoy music that you have legitimately bought.

Now all we need is for Apple to soften their approach to syncing your iPod with more than one PC and we’ll be making REAL progress in providing a highly usable digital music experience. Hurrah!

Tags: DRM, glasvegas, mp3, music, sony