Get Outta My Way iTunes!

Have any of you scratched your head at the concept of pre-ordering a record on iTunes? What really is the point since iTunes is all about instant gratification. Well, lately they have started adding bonus tracks not available unless you pre-order to make this idea more appealing. I recently pre-ordered a record since I knew the day it came out I would be purchasing it anyway in order to take a look at the bonus material.

Picture this, it is Tuesday morning in the UK and I settle down to a cup of coffee and the plugging in of my iPod to download the new record for my commute to work.

Commute to work starts and after daughter is safely off to school, I put in my ear buds and prepare for my first listen of some of the new material….but they aren’t there. I frantically do a check on the iPod and only three of the tracks have downloaded. Hmmm, maybe I unplugged before the downloading had finished?

Get to work and plug everything in and click on the check for purchases, get the message that there are no new purchases and the iPod is synched up.

Begin my commute home, thinking alright, all the tracks must now be there! NOPE!

So I try it all again when I get home, comparing the tracklist to what is in my iTunes and I still don’t see all the songs. I go to the purchase history and it looks like I have purchased ALL the tracks so next to the album title there is a “report a problem”. I use this to explain that not all the tracks downloaded. I also go to the “report a problem” next to a couple of individual tracks and report that they haven’t been downloaded thinking this is overkill since I am hoping my reporting of the problem with the album as a whole will fix the situation.

Picture this, I wake up Wednesday morning and with my cup of coffee I check my email and see that iTunes has fixed the problem but only with the two individual tracks that I have reported, which means I had to report the other two today in order to get the complete album. So what this means is that I could have walked to a London record store from my village and back and bought a copy before I had the entire album from iTunes. What the fuck?

If I am going to buy a full album, I want to hear it for the first couple of times from start to finish. Is that too much to ask for?

Accidents can happen and since I work in a technology company, I can forgive a portion of this. What I have trouble with is the stingy customer support. After typing into what ended up being six or seven “report a problem” forms, you’d think they’d just set up my account to download the whole album again. It’s not like I would be getting something for free by them doing this. Somehow the bonuses just don’t seem like bonuses now… --J