DNBA download store to close......

blumarten said:
have you done the maths? running a download store is a very hard thing to do & succeed at
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I'd made an assumption with small profits on digital music resale you'd need to sell a lot to cover your everyday running costs of servers and web store renewals and all that malarky.

I'm guessing this has a lot to do with the recent trend of bandcamp becoming so popular. No distro to pay (although not sure myself on bandcamp costs so don't quote me!).
 
iamdjsimm said:
I'd made an assumption with small profits on digital music resale you'd need to sell a lot to cover your everyday running costs of servers and web store renewals and all that malarky.
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you don't even need to go into that level of detail. let's say you have only 1 employee running the store... doing absolutely everything - managing the site, administering the labels, reporting etc etc... and that 1 person is only paid, say, £20k a year.
Now say the store gets 30% of each track sold, and the tracks sell for, say, £0.99 - the store is getting around £0.30 per track.
Just to cover the 1 employee's salary you'd need to be selling almost 70,000 tracks a year, or nearly 200 a day. And that's before you even start thinking about servers, storage, backups, bandwidth, site costs and so on.

Once you start thinking through the numbers you can see how it's actually incredibly hard to make a download store work.
 
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blumarten said:
have you done the maths? running a download store is a very hard thing to do & succeed at
Click to expand...

No maths necessary. I've been a regular digital customer of juno, beatport, trackitdown, nu-urban before it closed, and countless other label download stores, and dnba's download store is by far the most awkward and needlessly complicated mp3 store I've ever encountered on the net. Not used it in about a year but when I did their clip player was always horrendous, rarely worked right, would get permanently stuck on some kind of weird auto play loop playing tracks I never even wanted to hear, and wouldn't preview tracks I clicked play on - when it did it would take up to a minute between clicking play and the clip playing. Also for some bizarre reason it would automatically put 'DJ Origin - Rubber Gloves' in my cart every time I logged, so I'd then have to unselect it, then next time I logged in it would be back in my cart!

I also bought a couple of tracks that never appeared in my download section (and I know other people had similar happen to them) and no help/correspondence given after contacting dnba

Plus the whole layout of the place is fiddly - that's just an opinion, granted, but doesn't help their case imo.
 
sure, I wasn't commenting on the UX (in fact i've never used the dnba store in my life), i was just commenting on the general economics
 
Large Marge said:
No maths necessary. I've been a regular digital customer of juno, beatport, trackitdown, nu-urban before it closed, and countless other label download stores, and dnba's download store is by far the most awkward and needlessly complicated mp3 store I've ever encountered on the net. Not used it in about a year but when I did their clip player was always horrendous, rarely worked right, would get permanently stuck on some kind of weird auto play loop playing tracks I never even wanted to hear, and wouldn't preview tracks I clicked play on - when it did it would take up to a minute between clicking play and the clip playing. Also for some bizarre reason it would automatically put 'DJ Origin - Rubber Gloves' in my cart every time I logged, so I'd then have to unselect it, then next time I logged in it would be back in my cart!

I also bought a couple of tracks that never appeared in my download section (and I know other people had similar happen to them) and no help/correspondence given after contacting dnba

Plus the whole layout of the place is fiddly - that's just an opinion, granted, but doesn't help their case imo.
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blumarten said:
sure, I wasn't commenting on the UX (in fact i've never used the dnba store in my life), i was just commenting on the general economics
Click to expand...

I'm guessing combined with large marge's UX (and others by the sounds of it), and the points Mr Ten makes about costs, D&BA have looked at it and said something along the lines of, can we be arsed ploughing this much into it to fix it?

The player was a nightmare but I didn't really use it. I tend to know what I'm buying so don't really preview that much.
 
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