Burn Lounge: Navigating to Nothing
Imagine the ultimate execution of the long tail in music.
First:
Every track published would be available to purchase via download–at customized levels of compression. Infinite supply.
Second:
You would be able to expose your music collection, playlists, blog entries, etc, as navigable items for purchase — where you take a variable cut of profits. Incentive to sell.
Third:
Discount tools would exist between publishers and sellers that allow for variable incentive arrangements based on conversion. The more demand you create for publishers the more you get paid.
Fourth:
The music is free from DRM and licensed for use in North America, flowing out to all populated countries. Item 2 and 3 help create checks and balances from widespread illegal file sharing.
Fifth:
You could find new music in multiple ways, suited to you. This would be accomplished via collaborative filtering, friend recommendations, related artists and tracks, tagging, folksonomies, genres, moods, etc.
Just rambling these off–but for a purpose. Burn Lounge seems to be at the front of something like this… however, without a change in the user experience, they are doomed to fail.
Read more on navigating to nothing.
The Beginning
This is the first thing I’m greeted with when I hit Burn Lounge. I’m using Firefox on a Mac. I go ahead and click through. It seems the site works… but see my comments at the end.
The Home Page
So once I click through to the home page, I see a very clean, apparently very navigable site.
I Want to Buy
The home page leads me to the prominent “Buy Music” tab. This is what I see. Okay–where is the music? I click the music tab in the top left to proceed. Does this make sense? The orange bolded “Buy Music” in the center is not a link.
So maybe now I can buy music? Register. Okay. Now I have to search for stores to buy music?
How do I know a retailer name? What does my zipcode have to do with anything?
So I searched around a found some links to retailers. Here is where my Firefox on a Mac kills me… can’t preview music. That effectively makes the store useless to me.
So how about selling music? I can’t tell you much–because the only way I can learn about selling is to pay $30 to start an account. They say they have a one million title catalog–but I can’t use the site effectively enough to even know if they offer what I would sell? And their revenue model seems to be based on taxing sellers rather than publishers? Or maybe they’re doing both. I don’t get it. Just not well thought out on the compensation structure. To me, you subsidize the selling tools to gain adoption, then tax the transactions. This this isn’t the case, they obviously don’t have the scale of transactions. I’ll save a later post to talk about what they should do to counteract this dilemma.
At first blush, I’m someone who would use a service like this–but Burn Lounge has done everything they can to create a site and service that is unusable. Great idea… terrible execution.