Hands on with Datz Music Lounge
Our Datz Music Lounge box was delivered this morning, just too late to be reviewed in our feature on the new UK-based unlimited MP3 service in yesterday’s Music Ally Report. So we’re writing about it on here instead.
To quickly recap, it’s not your average online music subscription service for several reasons. Firstly, it’s sold as a boxed product, including a USB dongle that has to be plugged into your PC for the service to work.
It costs £100, and lets you download as many MP3 tracks from participating labels as you want for a year – one of the first examples of an all-you-can-eat service with participation from major labels (EMI and Warner Music Group so far).
Below, we’re going to walk you through our first experience with the service – and then we’ll follow up with a more considered verdict next week. You can click on the images to make them larger.
THE BOX / TERMS & CONDITIONS
The boxed product itself certainly looks worth £100 – it doesn’t feel cheap’n'nasty. Inside the box you get a CD, an instruction booklet and the USB dongle. However, on the outside there’s some more info about the service’s terms & conditions.
In terms of system requirements, DML [as we'll be referring to it] only works on PCs running Windows Vista or Windows XP Service Pack 2. It doesn’t work on 64-bit versions of Windows, or Macs – although a note on the packaging says Mac OS X software will be made available to download in December.
The blurb on the box also talks about the service’s fair use policy, asking customers to “use the services fairly” and “remember that the Datz Music Lounge services are for your personal use only”. It goes on to say that Datz won’t accept excessive bandwidth usage, and specifically “usage which is automated through the application of a Java Script or software program”. In other words, if you try to trouser millions of songs through some automated jiggery-pokery, your account will be suspended.
Perhaps sensibly, the final warning on the blurb says customers should check the list of artists whose music is available on the service via its website BEFORE removing the VOID stickers to open the box (after which it can’t be returned). That’ll be to stop any ‘But The Beatles aren’t on there, gimme my money back!’ kerfuffles.
INSTALLATION AND REGISTRATION
Installation was a pretty painless process – the software identifies what components you’re missing on your PC (Windows Installer 3.1 and .NET Framework 3.5 in our case) and installs them, before installing the slightly ominously-named Sentinel Dongle software.
One thing we can foresee causing a worry for the parents Datz is hoping will buy this product is the fact that the Sentinel Dongle software modifies your internet firewall settings. It tells you it’s doing that, so there’s no underhand behaviour, but you can imagine less techy users being concerned about this. Assuming they’re aware of what a firewall is, of course.
Actually, there’s also a blizzard of pop-up windows asking for your permission to agree to various bits of the installation, which again, could intimidate the average parent. Don’t forget, this thing is being sold in Sainsbury’s, not PC World. It’s maybe not Datz’s fault that it has to tweak your system settings, but some users may balk at the installation process.
Once finally installed, firing it up brings an invitation to download the latest update to the software, then a message asking you to plug the dongle in. Then it’s onto the registration screen (right), which is fairly restrained: name, date of birth, address, email and a password.
HOME-SCREEN AND BASIC NAVIGATION
Phew, we’re in! And the homescreen is pretty different from iTunes, Nokia Music etc. It’s taken up almost entirely by 15 songs (NOT albums), with buttons to preview and download them.
Clicking on an artist name takes you to their page (Mystery Jets example on the right), telling you how many tracks of theirs are available on the Music Lounge, and presenting those tracks in alphabetical order by song title, in the same ‘15 per screen’ format (although you can change this to 45 or 100).
Thinking as a potential user, this is the first problem with the Datz Music Lounge. Say you want the latest album from the Mystery Jets – there’s no way to search for that album and cue the whole thing up for downloading – you have to do it track by track, having gone elsewhere (e.g. Wikipedia) to find the tracklisting.
Making the Lounge searchable by tracks only may put a cap on users’ downloading due to the fiddliness of cueing up a bunch of albums – and thus rein in the potential mechanical royalties payable by Datz – but it’s hardly a user-friendly experience.
The company’s boss Michael Richardson told Music Ally that they’re working on making the service, and specifically its search process, easier to use. Fingers crossed that happens soon, because right now, the contrast with Nokia’s Comes With Music UI is glaring.
The homepage could do with work too – it might be apeing iTunes to have What’s New, What’s Popular, Editorial Picks and so on, but it would stimulate usage much more than 15 random tracks and a search box. You can browse by genre (right – Electronica), but bringing up a big long list of 35,761 tracks is hardly helpful.
AVAILABLE CATALOGUE
As we said EMI and Warner Music Group are the two majors on board so far, so how do we fare with a search for some of their artists? On the EMI side of things, there are 152 Radiohead tracks, but the Katy Perry album isn’t available (just the songs off her Ur So Gay single). There’s a whopping 1,081 Beach Boys songs, and no problem finding Norah Jones, Gorillaz, Daft Punk, Robbie Williams… But very little Coldplay – seven tracks in fact. So there are holes, but a pretty good selection.
On the WMG side of things, there’s only one Bjork song, no Kid Rock (but then he’s something of a digital holdout), lots of The Doors, only a couple of Slipknot albums, 185 Green Day tracks, but only 33 by My Chemical Romance. If the last three seem strange choices to look up, it’s because if DML is aimed at teenagers as Datz claims, it’s going to need excellent coverage of, well, the music that teenagers love.
On the Beggars side, there’s no Arcade Fire and no White Stripes, although in the latter case, there do appear to be a lot of cover versions by ‘Various Artists’, which is confusing. No Dizzee Rascal, no Friendly Fires, only one Sonic Youth track… Not much, in other words.
In short, there are still holes even in those labels who’ve signed up for DML, let alone the ones that haven’t. It’s early days, and Datz will persumably be adding more tracks in the months to come. But the key date is really 25th December, if this is intended as a Christmas present for teenagers. If they log on and don’t find the music they want, there’ll be tears (or furious BitTorrenting) before bedtime.
D0WNLOAD PROCESS
DML is effectively a web-based store accessed through a desktop PC application, so when you click on the button to download a track, a pop-up invites you to save it as if it was a file being downloaded from a web browser (right).
Once downloaded, you just open up your preferred music app (including iTunes) and import the files in – if this is aimed at tempting people away from BitTorrent and LimeWire, this process should present few problems.
The files can also obviously be transferred to a portable player or mobile phone, via the usual channels.
Having downloaded some Norah Jones, we were pleased with the quality (320 kbps), but not so happy with the metadata when imported into iTunes. It didn’t know what album it was from, or what number the track was (see right).
The same thing happened with a Daft Punk download, and a Green Day track. Maybe it’s not Datz’s fault that important metadata is missing, but it’s a pain for users of the service.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
The holes in the catalogue and the missing metadata can generously be put down to teething problems, but as we said, if DML is being pitched as the perfect Christmas present, there’s a hard deadline to get them sorted.
Meanwhile, it’s hard not to think that the overall experience of DML needs work too – thinking about how users may want to discover and download music, rather than the fiddly track-based interface it’s debuted with. It’s particularly strange given the noises an increasing number of artists and labels are making about persuading fans to download whole albums rather than cherry-pick tracks.
Datz’s pricing model remains innovative, and the fact that it’s got two majors to sign up for an all-you-can-eat MP3 service is hugely impressive. But on our first impressions, the Datz Music Lounge itself has a way to go to be as user-friendly as other legal music stores / services out there. Being just more user-friendly than illegal P2P software isn’t quite enough.
Tags: datz music lounge
November 14th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
Great thorough review! The search functionality and missing meta tags would almost kill it for me. I much prefer albums over singles and it would be a pain to add meta tags to 60-70 songs if I were to download five albums in a given week.
HOWEVER! The thought of being able to get several new albums a week to feed my music habit is fantastic and at a price like that its hard to turn down. I think I could overlook the rather large missing pieces for awhile. Of course the biggest benefit is no DRM. I loved the Yahoo! Music Store and subscribed for a year or two but not being able to put those tracks on my iPod and only hearing them at my computer was a drag.
Looking forward to their improvements of the service!
November 19th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
[...] following UK supermarket Sainsbury’s and high-street chains Blockbusters and WHSmiths. We reviewed the service last week, and had criticisms about the breadth of catalogue, but most importantly the fiddly [...]
August 16th, 2009 at 11:38 am
Having originally received a Datz subscription last year, initial impressions were good. There was a good choice to download.
However it has slowly gone down hill. At this point in time 16/8/09 the choice is truly appalling. When you do find something you want it is usually a karaoke track or recorded by another artist.
Datz use a third party (http://www.247entertainment.com/) to supply the music. Is every customer of 247 Entertainment receiving such a poor catalogue of music?
As I write this the Datz site is returning SQL errors!
I would avoid unless Datz can improve the catalogue.
September 9th, 2009 at 10:45 am
I paid £89 FOR 12 MONTHS DOWNLOADS.A
after ONLY 4 MONTHS THE WEBSITE HAS CLOSED. What do I do now.