If you’re nodding at this price thinking, yeah, yeah, but Let There Be Rock aside, these aren’t among the strongest AC/DC studio albums out there, Wal-Mart also had Back In Black, Highway To Hell and Dirty Deeds selling for $7 each. Yowsa! As I wrote yesterday, I’m not a Wal-Mart fan, but it’s hard to argue with these bargain prices.

If you need to round out your AC/DC collection, might want to check this deal out. I noticed that the Walmart website had some of their studio albums for $9, but I saw them all priced locally for $7. If you’re new to the rock steady world of AC/DC this means you could pick up their entire back studio album library of 15 CDs (15 x 7 = $98) for a little over 100 bucks [AC/DC studio albums: ‘74 Jailbreak, High Voltage, Dirty Deeds, Let There Be Rock, Powerage, Highway To Hell, Back In Black, For Those About To Rock We Salute You, Flick of the Switch, Fly On The Wall, Who Made Who, Blow Up Your Video, The Razor’s Edge, Ballbreaker, Stiff Upper Lip].

Have you seen new AC/DC studio albums available for less than $7 each? Can’t say I have. Hells Bells for competition, it’s a dog eat dog!

We had our first Mr. Freeze, purchased back in September 2006, go down at the start of summer and finally got around to buying a replacement.

My wife and I couldn’t agree on how long Mr. Freeze lasted. She thought it was like 2 1/2 years or longer. It seemed like less time to me. Turns out after searching back through this blog (a good reason to blog your purchases) it was less than two years. If you factor in the amount of ice this thing puts out when you use it regularly like we have compared to buying ice or messing around with ice trays (no thank you), that’s not as bad as it might sound. It’s a work of mechanical brilliance if you compare it to our lock with the Xbox 360 (we’re on #7 Xbox 360 console in less than 3 years).

Mr. Freeze will still set you back about $250 USD. As much as I’m liking Mr. Freeze, this one had better last at least three years. We bought it online.  Saw it once in Coscto, but never in any other local stores.

As their customer you would expect they’d respect my simple request not to solicit me. Check out the creative subject line of their email received this morning at 6:25am: "Notification about Email from Comcast." Stay with me, it gets even more silly.

Now the body of Comcast’s email below, red penciled by me:

#1 - Comcast acknowledges that as their customer I’ve asked them not to communicate with me regarding "offers and promotions." They are calling this email a "service-related email" (see #5) and yet asking me to "Sign Up Now" (#3). Is that a service or an offer or promotion? You decide.

#2 - Comcast respects my privacy and promises to only send essential emails. Is this email essential to my Comcast service, really? It seems more like them reminding me that I have told them that I don’t want them to send me offers and promotions and yet wanting me to sign up so I can receive offers and promotions. If this is a small sampling of their urgent news, I’ll pass, thank you.

#3 - Call to action. A link is not always promotional, but if I’m being urged to buy something or sign up one could argue that yes, that is promotional.

#4 - Comcast appreciates my understanding? Really? Implied consent, I guess. No, really I don’t understand the purpose of this essential service email. Yes, I told them not to send me promotional emails but they somehow feel compelled to remind me that I’m not receiving promotional emails and appreciate my understanding and — by the way — I can "Sign Up Now" not to miss out on future promotional emails.

#5 - Just another friendly reminder in smaller, gray text that this, indeed, is not an offer or promotion, it’s only a service-related email. Did you get that? We appreciate your understanding.

Come on, Comcast, this pedantic email begs to be deleted. Especially with the Sign Up Now link it flirts dangerously close to spam, close enough to put it in the spam category. On the other hand, it’s kind of funny. Thank you for the essential email smile this morning.

Meanwhile a friend is also having trouble accessing his broker services (which aren’t the same as mine). I can get into Trowe Price, so not every brokerage with online access is having online issues, but it does make one think: what if there really was some major depression-like event and you wanted to trade your assets, would your web access be unavailable due to technical issues?

It’s time like these that we have to go back to face to face brokerage transactions or using the phone and waiting on hold. I wonder, though, if we’re having problems accessing our trading accounts, are the brokers also having trouble too?

Twitter problems seem minor at the moment. BTW, I don’t want to get in to sell any holdings, nor short any of the 799 financial stocks that have a temporary ban on short sales, I want to BUY. I haven’t sold any of my holdings this week. Check out the DOW over the last year:

-13.63%, down almost 1,800 points. Kraft (KFT) is replacing AIG in the DOW. This has been a wild, wild week on Wall Street.

Didn’t go through as many screenshot motions as I did with CD Baby, but Snocap wouldn’t let me add my credit card in Firefox so I could finish the order. I kept hitting the ’submit’ button and nothing happened. Grrrr.

When I fired up Internet Explorer things seemed to work correctly, but minor gripe, why as a first time customer do I have to do the following:

1. check box next to the song to order
2. confirm order
3. be taken to another browser window — hey I’m already in one — to visit Snocap to register for the site and add payment information on file. Why not open in a tab? And why not wait for the other browser window until we actually add payment information and can verify we are on a secure page?
4. In IE I saw an option to use PayPal. After authorizing, did the system take me back to finish the order? Of course not. So back to the other browser tab to try the order again.
5. This time it went through and asked me if I wanted to download the Snocap download manager or download the songs direct. By all means to anybody reading, choose to download the songs direct.

From experience I should have done that, but didn’t. Next, the order screen turned into a message saying there was an error returned from the software. Meanwhile, the Snocap download manager was still installing. Huh? When it fully installed and ran it didn’t show any music for me to download.

[sigh] Here we go again. Didn’t we just do this a week ago with CD Baby?

6. I went directly to the Snocap site and checked this out:

The ultimate website NON-confidence builder: big, broken image. The screenshot might be a bit small but there is only a ‘profile’ link and ’sign out’ — nothing about account or transaction history. They lose points for not making this more clear. When you click on ‘profile’ you can then navigate to your transaction history.

7. And there, finally, I can download the songs one at a time without having to use the download manager. I didn’t see any way to add the songs to the snocap download manager. Fortunately all the songs from Solitary downloaded.

Why is buying music from some of these online music sites a hassle? I’ve had very good experiences with AmazonMP3, iTunes and Zune but my last two experiences with services I haven’t used before has not been good. I was pleased to see the artist, Heavy Jack, reply this morning to my experience last week and say they are looking into it.

I’m starting to understand, but still don’t think it’s cool, people who go the bittorent route to get the hard to find music. Enough of this, what about the Don Dokken solo acoustic album, Solitary. Is it any good?

It’s mellow, I’ll say that. Have to listen to it more to judge but I’ve always liked Don Dokken’s mellow stuff. On his first solo album the song "1,000 miles Away" is one of my favorites. With Dokken who doesn’t like "Alone Again?"  And pretty much the entire Under Lock and Key album (ok, not every song is mellow on there, but that one seemed like one of the most mellow Dokken albums) with tracks like "It’s Not Love" and "Jaded Heart." Then there are some more rare and less commercially appreciated albums like Dysfunctional with excellent songs like "The Maze" and "From The Beginning."

In the official Dokken podcast #2 and elsewhere Don Dokken keeps saying that this year’s good selling Lightning Strikes Again (my favorite track off that one is "Oasis") is probably the last Dokken studio album. He wants to do something outside what he feels are the musical confines of Dokken. Something "harder." Rhino, the company who published Lightning would like another Dokken album but it doesn’t sound like Don Dokken is interested at the present time.

One request, whatever you do, Don: please make it easy and hassle-free to buy whatever album you make going forward. This is something for musicians to keep in mind with how they choose to distribute their music. If you make it too much of a pain in the ass, some (many?) fans will take the path of least resistance. A quick search engine query reveals tons of illegal avenues to acquire Solitary.

Solitary Track List

1. "In The Meadow"
2. "I’ll Never Forget" - the ID tags in this MP3 were not set correctly and I had to manually fix. Good thing it’s easy to do these days in a wide variety of software.
3. "Where The Grass Is Green"
4. "Ship Of Fools"
5. "You Are Everything"
6. "Venice"
7. "Sarah" - Don Dokken says this song is about a "first love" he had in the 80s. One of the better tracks.
8. "The Tragedy"
9. Someday

If you like the harder Dokken songs like "Breaking The Chains" then Lightning Strikes Again will be more satisfying. If, like me, you enjoy the mellow side of Dokken, roll the dice with Snocap or attend one of the Don Dokken solo shows when he starts doing them again (he’s out touring with Dokken in support of Lightning now). He is selling Solitary at his shows. I wish he’d consider using a service like Tunecore.com which will get his music out on iTunes, AmazonMP3, Rhapsody, Napster, EMusic and more.

One of the things I like about CD Baby is they take a very small percentage of the money from the sale. Via their artist signup site:

For digital sales, we keep only a 9% cut, paying 91% of all income directly to the artist.  For physical CDs, we keep $4 per CD sold.

Good deal for artists/bands, I’m there. So yesterday I checked out this music discovery service and came across Heavy Jack. Loved their song Fly Away (Black Crow), particularly the Hendrix-like vibe, embed is below for readers from the blog (won’t show in RSS feed):

Good stuff, I wanted to show them some material ($) fan love and thus went to their website this morning and saw I could purchase their album in CD or MP3 format. I went for the MP3 format which cost $9.99. I used PayPal and received confirmation that CD Baby was paid right away at 7:02am PST.

What I didn’t receive as expected was a download link from CD Baby or explanation of when the download link would be coming. I waited. And waited. Waited. Started to wonder around 10 minutes if the order didn’t go through on CD Baby’s end. Hey, sometimes things happen.

30 minutes later I decided to write an email to CD Baby with a copy of the transaction number and ask them how long it took to get the download link? I didn’t expect to receive a response to this email right away. If I got a response by the end of the business day, I’d be happy. Through experience have learned to set expectations lower when emailing customer service of any site online. It’s a pleasant surprise when somebody responds right away, but a business day is reasonable.

49 minutes after the sale, I received an email with the subject line: "CD Baby loves Tdavid" and order # confirmation:

Nevermind being anal about their script failing to capitalize the ‘D’ in my name, that’s just nitpicky, what does matter is that the download link they provided in their email didn’t work. The page just errored out. Waited a few more minutes, figuring maybe there was another delay before the download link was activated. As silly as that seems, have seen that situation before. Nope, didn’t matter, still didn’t work.

In their ‘love me’ email they added the message:

If you’re not able to use that link from this email or just not
ready to download yet, you can always log in to your account at
http://cdbaby.com/account and find all of your MP3s in the "Your
Downloads" section.

Hello, I was able and ready 55 minutes ago. If you love me, just give me a download link that works already. Where is the music I paid for? WTF is up with this place? I don’t walk into a music store and pay them for a CD and then come back and hour later and still can’t get the CD to take home. This isn’t ordering a pizza on a Friday night when the parlor is getting slammed and they are understaffed, it’s an automated web order system for a digital download.

1 hour 25 minutes (8:27am PST) after the sale and all I see when I click the download link in CD Baby is this:

At this point I thought maybe, maybe the download link would work on another computer. Tried it on my laptop. No work in Firefox or Internet Explorer.

1 hour 42 minutes here I sit still unable to download music from the link. If I was into BDSM I’d try buying another MP3 download from CD Baby for a different artist just to see if this negative customer experience was an isolated case. Instead, I’m making this blog post for others to tell me their CD Baby MP3 purchase customer experiences. Did you get your MP3 download right away? Did it take more than a couple hours? Did the download link not work at first and work later?

1 hour 53 minutes. Still no working download. I’m getting ready to hit publish on this post. Some say you should never blog mad, I say when your wallet is impacted: screw that! This is a bad experience.

2 hours. Wow. The download link finally worked! I’m going to publish this as written anyway to see if this is the norm for CD Baby MP3 purchases. If this is the normal customer experience, CD Baby is one torturing lover. If you run a music delivery service, don’t make your customers wait two hours for digital downloads.  Two minutes, fine. Two hours and it’s time to hire new programmers.

Update 10:02am PST: Received an email response from “pony” at CD Baby apologizing for their servers being down this morning while they did some work.

Now 2 of 6 our Xbox 360s have crapped out in the time since we’ve bought the PS3 and Wii.

The word ridiculous, maybe even astounding, comes to mind when describing how poorly the Xbox 360 hardware has performed for our family since April 15, 2006. I can think of only one other piece of gaming hardware — the Rock Band drum pedal — that has failed more than twice per year. We’re on drum set #3 since our first purchase November 2007, and I’m hoping Rock Band 2 drum kit which comes out soon will be more durable and have a longer lifespan.

At least two times per year our family is reminded of the lousy workmanship of the Xbox 360 hardware. Two times or more a year to say: “this sucks” or using today’s hot buzzword: FAIL.

You’ve probably guessed what the picture above means by now. Around dinner time last night we came home with Soul Calibur 4 and tried to fire up in my seldom used Xbox 360 Elite.

Three red rings. Nooooooooooooooooooooooo.

And here I was thinking the Elite would be different. This is a machine that had maybe an average of two plays per week over the course of 16 months. Still it holds the record in our home for the longest lasting Xbox 360, but that’s not anything to brag about. A discouraging 16 months before lighting up the three red middle finger salute. Thankfully we were smart enough to purchase the Best Buy warranty plan for 80 bones. We took it back and above you see me holding Xbox 360 #7 and Xbox Elite #2.

An now the history of our Xbox 360 carnage.

Xbox 360 systems that have died since April 15, 2006
#6: Saturday August 18, 2008. Three red rings of death. We used Best Buy replacement plan to swap out with brand new Xbox Elite.
#5: January 1, 2008 (Happy New Year, Microsoft!). Status: three red rings of death, unrepaired. Under warranty, Microsoft replaced within a month.
#4: Xbox 360 broken November 3, 2007. Status: broken disc tray, unrepaired. We replaced this system by buying a new Xbox 360 Arcade package (and yes, bought 2-year warranty).
#3: April 2007. Status: red rings of death, replaced three weeks later on April 23, 2007
#2: September 22, 2006. Status: red rings of death, replaced on October 20, 2006
#1: June 14, 2006. Our first Xbox 360 dies. Didn’t even make it two months.

Moral of Xbox 360 story: always, always, ALWAYS buy an extended warranty
I can’t recommend more strongly based on our own customer experience that not buying an extended warranty for an Xbox 360 is like having an orgy with a bunch of streetwalkers without wearing a condom.

The Xbox 360 still has the best live gaming experience out there, including the best selection of games to play online, and we will continue to replace the systems as they fail within warranty. But based on our experience to date, it’s reasonable to assume that out of warranty breakage heretofore could result in there being less Xbox 360 systems in play in our home. I love gaming and would replace dozens of game systems to play games that I enjoy, but having more than one of the same system constitutes a luxury and the Xbox 360 luxury tax has become very high.

Calculating an average of $300 per system and average Xbox 360 death rate of 5 months equals $60/month for the hardware cost only, not counting Xbox Live or the cost of buying games. Talk about an expensive hobby!

We still have 4 Xbox Live Gold accounts, although we’ve setup one of those to non-renew. Our oldest son doesn’t play Xbox enough to warrant having a Gold ($49.99/year) account. He’s 18 now, he can pay for it himself if he wants. If he looks at extending the life of his Xbox 360 he might be wise to play it only a couple times per year and maybe, maybe it will make it to his 21st birthday.

How long until Xbox 360 death #7 is recorded? Early 2009 if you play the averages, but wouldn’t bet against that happening by the end of the year. Double digits by 2010? Only the Xbox afterlife knows.

Last week I learned through the newsletter about Gibson having a cool presence inside Second Life and wrote about it at VTOR, this week I learned that Arlen Roth is offering free daily video guitar lessons. His first lesson is on the pentatonic scales.

If you want to learn guitar there are hundreds of different techniques. I think the fastest way to learn is getting a few lessons from another guitar player. Somebody who will show you how to play songs and techniques and teach you music theory, not only the latter.

I’m in the camp that says don’t spend too much time on learning the scales right away. Eventually scales will be your lifeblood, especially for things like improvisation and soloing, but when starting out you just want to learn to play something or it will be frustrating. For that, learn how to read tablature and pick up a handy tab read/writing tool like Power Tab Editor (freeware) or Guitar Pro (free demo, commercial). After that you’ll find tabs for popular songs all over the place.

Gibson provides a good business example website
Getting back to Gibson, business owners should look at how they have done their website as far as features, not so much as functionality. They are a fairly progressive company with links on many of their pages to digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, etc. They offer podcasts and blogs (kind of weak, from what I’ve seen thus far) as well as have wiki (generating a lot of errors, not so good) and fairly active forums community area.  Their newsletter provides a great example of how to soft sell with value both your prospective and current customers.

At their newer site MissionMetallica.com you can register for free and gain free access to download several full past concerts plus get nearly daily updates on the upcoming album: Death Magnetic.

And speaking of Death Magnetic, the 7/17 update shares the album art for the new album (pictured above). You can download from MissionMetallica the album art in the following resolutions: 1280×1024, 1024×768, 800×600 as well as instant messenger buddy icons. One thing missing from the MissionMetallica.com website are RSS updates and podcasts. There are regular updates with some meat on the bones, check this screenshot out:

Optionally, you can choose to purchase three additional Mission Metallica experiences:

• Experience #2: $24.99 includes everything that Experience #1 (FREE) includes (whichI’ve written about in this post) plus download of Death Magnetic at midnight on street date at 320kbps + downloads of two entire shows from the summer tour + almost 2 hrs. of additional "fly on the wall" footage + 250 additional photos, ringtones of riffs from the new album + exclusive contests and $10 off merch or Fan Club membership at Metallica.com.
• Experience #3: $32.99 includes everything from Experience #1 and #2 + Death Magnetic CD with FREE shipping. I’ve got my eye on this one.
• Experience #4: $124.99 includes everything from Experience #1,#2 and #3 + a limited edition collectible 5LP 180 gram box with 5 individual sleeves.

Album art looks like Twilight Zone meets The Mummy. I’m psyched. I know, St. Anger was a letdown, but I’m ready for Death Magnetic and liking what the boys are doing with their music and multiple websites these days. If Death Magnetic is good they should go a long way to earning back some lost fans. Probably not the ones they were in favor of suing, but hey, it’s a start. Check it out.

Update July 23, 2008 8:16pm PST: The Death Magnetic complete track list has now been shared in the running order (10 songs):

That Was Just Your Life
The End Of The Line
Broken, Beat & Scarred
The Day That Never Comes
All Nightmare Long
Cyanide
The Unforgiven III
The Judas Kiss
Suicide & Redemption
My Apocalypse

Additionally, on Friday’s they offer 5 albums for $5 each. Sure, they might be taking a loss on some of these, but they are getting me in the habit of checking in daily to see what they have to offer, and of course as long as I’m there, I may end up picking up a song or too.

The folks at Amazon are smart, Chris. They have found a way to make money using Twitter, something that people have been wondering how to do since it became popular among the tech crowd.

AmazonMP3 is doing everything Chris mentions above in their Twitter feed in 140 characters or less. I’m sure this is 98% automated and a great example of how to use Twitter to keep people updated as well as to encourage shopping.

 
In the last week along I’ve bought a complete MP3 album and a couple individual songs that started the shopping from deals in the AmazonMP3 Twitter feed, something I can’t remember doing from another Twitter feed. @amazonmp3 is the only Twitter RSS feed I’m subscribed to in my RSS reader, as well to be certain I don’t miss a single message. Highly recommended for online music shoppers.