Will there ever be a good online download store?
Yes, this is pretty much a rant.
Why? Because you, a customer actually decide to pay for something you can get for free in the exact same quality. So you would expect to be treated nice as one of the few that actually pay? But wrong, the attitude of the stores/industry is pretty much "Fuck you". How do you see this? Just look How lousy most of these websites actually are actually build and how many easy-to-programm features they lack. Or how awful the translation is. Or how they relentlessy rip-off customers. The list could go on. I tested pretty much all of the at least middle to big stores and they ALL majorly suck in some parts.
But at first, let's see what would I except from a good downloadstore?
1) A simple, tidy, non-flashbased website design.
2) A good search function and costumizeable start page
3) Beatport's tracking (Label/Artists) function. Yeah Beatport actually did something good. Come on, it's not that hard to rip this off.
4) Full previews. Yeah, come on it's not like anybody will not buy a release because you can fully preview it. This is ridiculous and just show's the "fuck off" attitude of most stores.
5) reasonable prices. Yeah. 1.50 to 1.70 euros is NOT reasonable for a fucking file. This is pretty much a "You gotta pay for piracy" attitude.
6) A file format of your choice at the same price. Yeah WAV/FLAC maybe cost a bit more bandwith, but did these stores ever hear about something like being "Customer friendly?"
7) A broad choice of tracks. But this is not the sites faults, it's the labels fault
8) A good royalaty rate. Charging 50% for pretty much nothing is not good. In a capitalist way, yes. But not if the ONLY fucking reason to visit your store is "supporting the artists"
Hell yeah I love "supporting the artists" if they get 0.35 out of the 1.40 I paid 
9) No "exclusive" bullshit. This just promotes filesharing & a monopol, but yeah they don't care anyways
These may seem like a lot of points, but the only thing you gotta do is programm a good website & build in a few customer friendly features. Getting a broad choice of tunes is also the labels task.
A few smaller stores are actually decent (They still suck in some aspects though) but they don't get the stupport they should.
At this point I want to promote http://www.gogoyoko.com/. They give artists 100% of the sales. The design/site could be improved, but at least they try something to help the artists.
At first I pretty much bought everything but the more and more I see how little the stores care about the artists & the customers the more tempting filesharing gets.
a rant by a dissapointed customer
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