Functional recommendations are listed under the “Getting My Money” heading about half way down the page.

Since I am also an amateur DJ, I buy electronic music downloads for use with my DJing applications. The other reason I have significant user experience with various download stores, is that I built a website to automatically connect YouTube and SoundCloud to Amazon, iTunes, GooglePlay and 7 others.

Most music stores offer 30sec to 2min long previews. These are not optimal for their electronic genres, because house-techno-dubstep etc. tracks (songs) are much longer than “regular” music.

Fortunately, most electronic labels and producers upload longer previews and full-length (low-quality) versions of their tracks, to their official SoundCloud and YouTube channels.

Unfortunately, both YouTube and SoundCloud are built for music listening only, and do not integrate with download stores. Therefore, channel owners have to manually edit individual YouTube and SoundCloud video / clip pages to add purchasing links. Since this is tedious work and the uploads are first published before the tracks are released to stores’ catalogs, these official YouTube and SoundCloud pages often lack links to stores, or they have links to one or two different sites at best. The scale of this problem is ~15,000 new tracks (uploads) per week.

Since I am otherwise an IT analyst type, I built RemixRotation.com to help me and others, optimize time & money spent on music purchasing. In simplest terms, it helps me by doing these 3 things:

A. Dynamically combine YouTube and SoundCloud into one source of music — like this page for David Guetta;

B. Improve ad-hoc searching on SoundCloud and YouTube — to see what I mean, copy the SoundCloud example link; paste it into the power search form; and you’ll get matching (full length) YouTube video(s) for the original short preview from SoundCloud:

Example LINK to copy:

https://soundcloud.com/manual-music/phm-minski-lethe-preview

Paste into POWER SEARCH form http://remixrotation.com/search

C. Automatically link all YouTube+SoundCloud content to 10 top music download stores, via links like these created for track “Broomaan” by Giorgos Gatzigristos: Beatport, Amazon, JunoDownload, DJShop.de, DJTunes, TrackItDown, Traxsource, Bandcamp, iTunes and GooglePlay.

To try, click downward arrow in each row: Monstercat Label page

I chose these particular stores for the size of their electronic music catalog and ease of URL linking into their site search functions.

While working on all this, I have spent significant efforts comparing store pricing for same tracks as well as examining their user interfaces. Likewise, I have personally examined official YouTube + SoundCloud + Facebook + Twitter pages for ~ 10,000 of the top labels and top 12,000 DJs / producers.

I can tell you that no one in electronic music shares links to their pages on GooglePlay, whereas they often do so for iTunes, Amazon, JunoDownload, Traxsource and especially Beatport (due to their lock-in on release windowing).

GooglePlay music store on the web is aesthetically pleasing but functionally deficient: thus far, the interface is incomplete and inefficient. Ironically, the pricing is very favorable and can be the lowest of all the stores I mentioned. Here is one such example:

Beatport is 1.99 vs. GooglePlay price of 0.39

(on February 12, 2014 — prices can change over time)

Google’s resources are vast and their product design teams are often at the forefront of UX / UI. Before I get into all the music store interface shortcomings, let’s consider rational (+/- “”) causes that could justify design deficiencies:

Since Google has chosen to combine apps and music stores into one site & interface design — the assumption might be that the visitors will end up in the music store anyway, albeit accidentally?

Maybe Google does not care to make money on music download sales, since their music portfolio includes streaming on Songza, YouTube, YouTube Music Key etc?

Perhaps Google has chosen to compete with Amazon Music only — Amazon’s aesthetics are just awful, and their functionality is only slightly more advanced?

And, least rationally, Google might have deliberately created this sub par interface to perform some kind of a selection test and lure additional functional experts to their team (please contact me on LinkedIn).

Getting My Money

Mathematically speaking, my USD 20 monthly downloads budget, can buy up to 50 new tracks on GooglePlay, but instead, I will buy only 13 tracks on Beatport (their minimum price is 1.49).

The reasons for my economic “folly” are all the elements missing from this current GoogleMusic page for Rameses B :

There are at least 8 (simple) things Google can do to get my money — do you know what they are?

I need to know when these individual tracks were published — there is ample space for a Dates column. I want to see the entire list of tracks by this artist, and not just these 10 TOP SONGS (what does TOP mean?) It would be great if this new column allowed me to toggle between TOP SONGS and NEW SONGS (Date). Please add an indicator for rows that I have played just now — otherwise I can easily lose my position in the list, when I have to stop the previewing to take a phone call etc. Once a preview is completed, play needs to automatically advance to the next row. It does so for (some?) specific albums but not on pages comprised of tracks from multiple albums (like the Ramses B link above). To empathize #4 — please add page level “play/pause & next” controls, so that I can more easily advance through the list, while I am doing other things in the browser (on other tabs). Please buck the trend and place these near the top of the page for quicker clicking when I return to this browser tab. Allow me to click on “T-Mass” (row 5) or “Laura Brehm” (row 10) and get their individual lists of tracks. Also, cross-linking pages will help page SEO with this search company called Google. Add text & links to each row for label(s) that released the specific track, to let me explore respective label catalogs (and get yet more SEO “points”). Add genre description to each row — many artists work in multiple genres, on their own, or via collaborations & remixes.

These new elements can be hidden on smaller screens to preserve the current sense of aesthetic elegance.

Moreover, there are another 8, not-so-simple improvements necessary to leapfrog the competition:

Fix genre tags (& your charts will follow). When I open this page for “TECHNO” I see a lot of Daft Punk (disco-house-electro etc.) or even Pendulum (drum & bass) etc. The consequence of such mislabeling is that we have to spend 10x more time to find the same “quantity” of specific genre tracks for further consideration — if 10 electronic genres are lumped into any one of them, then only 10% of the tracks are what I really want to hear, and I do not know which, until I have already spent some time clicking on each. To fix this, you could also expand the commenting modules to crowd-source genre classification for your entire catalog.

Create a Rosetta “stone” for music and update (sync) my personal GooglePlay artist & label “subscription” based on my Facebook likes, my Twitter follows, my SoundCloud, and, of course, my YouTube subscriptions. My own analysis shows that 83% or more of the Top 1000 DJs-Producers-Artists have official Facebook AND Twitter AND YouTube AND SoundCloud. Let me know if you would like to start off with my own existing Rosetta for top 23,000 brands in electronic music.

Use this “Rosetta” to automatically push notifications & tag artists to chart updates via Twitter and Facebook — easier re-tweeting and sharing will bring more traffic.

Add Facebook & Twitter sharing to individual tracks and pages.

Add charts based on plays of related media on public YouTube (and SoundCloud). This will result in more competitive charting for music which was initially exclusive to other stores.

Make chart links specific to the current chart position for tracks & albums, so that artists and labels can more easily promote their success and link back with social shares.

Make your pages play store clips directly in my Facebook or Twitter timelines (like YouTube does).

Let us hear the whole tracks but add “radio jingle” style sound-marks to prevent piracy. In this case you should also add a fast-forward button so we can advance through the clips more quickly.

GoogelMusic team: please hurry — I want to get more downloads each month for the same amount of money I spend on Beatport!

My next article is about YouTube vs. SoundCloud — many labels and artists upload identical tracks to both platforms. I have built processing to examine about one million official uploads and identify YouTube vs. SoundCloud “duplicates” for a performance comparison. Please follow to learn about my findings.