OK, so after much gnashing of teeth and deliberation, I had decided to offer the album and individual songs for purchase through SNOCAP, the MySpace-affiliated storefront that caters to independent artists. Well, what a mistake this was! First off, I set up my SNOCAP account directly from the Stars Explode’s MySpace, only to have an impossible time of making the damn store appear as intended (yeah, I followed their instructions to a t). So then, after finally embedding the SNOCAP store widget into the band bio section, I thought I had better test it and buy a few tracks. Everything seemed fine after I created a separate buyer’s account and paid for a few of my own songs via Paypal. But when presented with a confirmation window within the SNOCAP widget that said “download your songs now,” I proceeded to try downloading them…but nothing happened. All I got was a little checkmark next to each song, but the mp3s never downloaded. SNOCAP offers a “Download Manager” which is supposed to allow you to download all the tracks you buy at once. But when I clicked the link to install that, I was met with a “Download Manager is not available for OS 10.4.9 yet, but it will be soon!” Gee, thanks.
I’m kicking myself for wasting so much time and energy on this, especially since I had some initial reservations about SNOCAP anyway (the founder is none other than Sean Fanning, the creator of Napster, of which I was never a fan). Although I knew the company was in a bit of a financial mess and had recently been acquired by imeem, I should have done more research before committing to it. Here’s a great thread from last March (see the comments below the main story) about SNOCAP from other disgruntled users: http://blog.wired.com/music/2007/03/snocap_asked_ap.html
In any case, I’m through with all this nonsense and hope to release the album properly via CDBaby/iTunes in the very near future.
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