Drive crash

As of saturday morning, everything should be working. If you're having problems playing or downloading something, please leave a comment here and indicate the download URL that's not working for you.

-john

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Monday 3pm:

One of our main drives crashed today, so about 1/3rd of the music on Magnatune isn't available at the moment. I'm restoring from backup, and it might take a day or two to get everything back.

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Monday 4pm:

I have everything except 23 albums now playing fine in the flash player. However, about 1/3rd of the catalog isn't downloadable, so please bear with me on this: that will be restored in about 10 hours.

The 23 albums (listed below) will take a bit longer and won't be playable for a day or two more:

Beyond 7: Revelations Per Minute
Eliyahu Sills: Eastern Wind
Ivan Ilic: Transcendental - Transcriptions by Brahms and Godowsky
Shawn Harris: Echoes of Autumn
Kitka: The Rusalka Cycle - Songs Between Worlds
Lara St John: Vivaldi - The Four Seasons
Paul Avgerinos: Love
Robert Rich: Alien Zoology CD1 - Live Archive Vol 4
Robert Rich: Alien Zoology CD2 - Live Archive Vol 4
Robert Rich: Cowell Theater CD1 - Live Archive Vol 5
Robert Rich: Cowell Theater CD2 - Live Archive Vol 5
Robert Rich: Due Acque - Live Archive Vol 2
Robert Rich: Ici et Maintenant CD1 - Live Archive Vol 1
Robert Rich: Ici et Maintenant CD2 - Live Archive Vol 1
Robert Rich: Lumin - Live Archive Vol 6
Robert Rich: Mycosphere - Live Archive Vol 7
Robert Rich: Shamballa - Live Archive Vol 3
Rocket City Riot: Saturday Night Angels
Shawn Harris: Echoes of Autumn
Solace: The Medusa Crown
Sulis: Sitting on the windowsill of Heaven - Celia Harper
The West Exit: Extra Century Perception
Tom Paul: Borrowed Time

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Monday 6pm:

All but the 23 albums above now are playable and have downloadable VBR MP3 files (the most popular download format). The Wav zip download files are just a few hours away from being completely restored.

And, it looks like everything will be back to normal late tomorrow (tuesday)

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Tuesday 5pm:

The backup is fully restored, and all but the 23 albums above are working as normal, with all download formats available.

These last 23 albums have now been uploaded to Magnatune and the various formats are being made now. This will probably take 24h to complete and then everything will be back to normal.

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Sorry about this!

-john

Magnatune iPhone app now available

Apple has approved our free iPhone app for listening to the entire Magnatune catalog from your iPhone.

You can install it by searching for "Magnatune" at the iphone store, or by clicking here.

This version lets you listen to all of the entire Magnatune catalog for free, but with my voice at the end of each song. We're submitting a new version to Apple today with membership support (as well as 128k mp3s over 3g), and I hope that Apple will that now that they've allowed us in.

More info about the app in a previous blog entry.

Android Phone users can use our Magnatune Android App.

Rob Costlow's Reconstruction Project

Magnatune musician Rob Costlow today launched his Reconstruction Project web site.

The aim of the site is to start an musician's cooperative where fans can go an obtain free albums from the musicians, and hopefully (and optionally) choose to support those musicians by buying (or licensing) their music.

In Rob's words:

Filled iPod for music licensing

A few film-makers have asked us over the years to fill their iPod with our music, so that they can easily browse everything in the Magnatune catalog at their leisure, as well as pull up the songs when they are editing the film and don't have access to the Internet. Also, a lot of people simply prefer browsing through music on their iPod (such as listening in their car)

I've decided to make "we'll fill your iPod" a standard offering for people who are regularly licensing music.

If you're a film-maker, video editor, ad-agency or other organization who is regularly licensing music, give us an email or call (contact details at the bottom of this licensing page).

You'll postal mail us your iPod, and we'll mail it back to you with the entire Magnatune catalog on it, all nicely organized into genres, artists and albums.

Mini-covers

The Magnatune web site is making much greater use of CD cover art now.

When albums are listed in genres, their covers are also now displayed:

On the artist pages, instead of a text list of albums, you'll now see small versions of the covers, and clicking on the covers plays the album:

The downside is that it's a bit busy looking at times, and can make the really long pages slower to load.

However, I personally like the striking visual effect of all those covers, and it's another, perhaps interesting way to look at albums you might be interested in. Also, the images are all a standard size, and quite small to download, so it isn't too much slower.

I think it works especially well on the artist's pages, which used to look like this, which I thought undersold the albums on the page:

Android app for Magnatune

An excellent Magnatune music player for Android phones is now available.

You can download it here.

Magnatune fan Evan Charlton emailed me in the spring about his doing this, and we've been trading email for a while. He's done a really excellent job. It even has more features than our in-house-developed, almost-available iPhone app!

With the Android Magnatune player, you can:
1) play all our music
2) search for our music
3) download, and choose the format
4) purchase albums
5) listen to the newest albums

It's a very pretty app, too!

I'm including a bunch of screen shots from the application, and there are even more at his web site.

Magnatune on the iPhone

The Magnatune iPhone app is now available on the iTunes store - this is an older blog entry about an earlier version of the iPhone app which Apple had rejected.

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The Magnatune app for the iPhone has been done for about five weeks. We're currently waiting for Apple to approve it and put it on the iTunes store so that everyone can start using it. We did get an email from Apple about 2 weeks ago that they're still reviewing it and that it's taking longer than they expected, so they haven't forgotten about us.

Update on October 5th: Apple has rejected our Magnatune app, and stated this as the reason: "Without Apple's prior written approval, an Application may not provide, unlock or enable additional features or functionality through distribution mechanisms other than the iTunes Store." The In App Purchase API is available in iPhone OS 3.0. It would be appropriate to resubmit your application for review once you've made the appropriate changes to your application. I'm not entirely sure, but I think they might not like that people can get a membership from Magnatune and then use the iPhone app to listen to music w/o commercial on the end. We're trying to get clarification on the reason for the rejection, and will resubmit the app to Apple to see if we can get it approved. It may be that the Magnatune iPhone app will not be able to support Magnatune memberships unless the members are paying through the iTunes payment system. We'll see.

It will be a free (no cost) download, and I'm hoping it will be very popular since it will be the only way to play albums of music through an iPhone app: all the other music apps I've seen for the iPhone choose the music for you (ie, pandora, last.fm) and are not album-oriented.

Below are several screenshots from the application. Basically, we mimicked the iPod player on the iPhone (so that it'd be easy to use), except that you can play the entire magnatune catalog, for free, from your iphone, and you don't need to download any music.

For free, the Magnatune iPhone app plays my voice announcing each track at the end of each song. If you have a Magnatune membership, the music plays without my voice interrupting things.

The audio quality is 64k mp3 when you're on the 3G network, and 128k mp3 when you're on wifi. We found that 3G handled the higher audio quality just fine, but we've also read about other audio apps being rejected because AT&T is worried about bandwidth, and that lofi audio on 3G would be wiser.

One of the nice features of the app is that it remembers what song you're listening to, so if you have to leave the app to do something else on your iPhone, when you come back it asks you if you want to continue playing the song you were listening to when you left.

Of course, I'll blog the status of the app just as soon as I hear something from Apple.

Visa no more

A few weeks ago, Magnatune stopped being able to accept VISA/Mastercard payments directly, and switched over to using Paypal as our exclusive payment processor.

You can still buy albums from Magnatune with your VISA/Mastercard. The change is that now it will be Paypal that will charge your credit card.

For one-time purchases, this change is quite minor: you're redirected to Paypal when you make your purchase, and you can use your credit card number there if you like (or your paypal account, of course)

For recurring payments, the change is more significant. Because we can no longer directly charge people's credit cards, we have to ask them to use a paypal account for their membership fees. You have to have a paypal account to have a Magnatune membership, unless you buy a lifetime membership, in which case no paypal account is needed.

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What happened? Getting slammed by VISA fraud

A few months ago, a bunch of people who trade in stolen credit cards decided to harass the hell out of Magnatune. I'm not sure why they chose to do this, but the cat-and-mouse game that ensued caused enough bad charges on our VISA merchant account, that our charge processor decided to cancel our merchant account.

At the worst of it, we were getting hundreds of fake credit card purchases per day. These people used a different credit card number and a different tcpip address for every purchase. They had the CVV number for each credit card, as well as the billing address. There really wasn't any way to differentiate them from normal charges, except for the huge volume increase in sales that occurred on days when we were targeted (which was most days, for a while).

Each morning, I would go through the previous day's charges and try to figure out which were fraudulent. For instance, the fraudsters liked to buy the same album over and over, using different accounts. Sometimes it would be an artist who normally sells very little, so that was a tip-off. Or, they'd use variations on the same name or password. Needless to say, I didn't catch all the fraud. Since we pay half to the musician, it's likely that Magnatune paid musicians royalties on charges that were eventually rolled back.

The problem got so bad that I made a big change at Magnatune: every new credit card used to buy something would need a 10 minute verification wait, and your purchase success information would delivered by email. That slowed the fraudsters down for about a week, and then the fraud picked up again, with disposable email addresses from hotmail, yahoo and google being used. The 10 minute wait did have an impact on sales, but I didn't really know what else to do to stop the daily fraud.

Because of the scale of the fraud, and the fact that they used a different tcpip address and email address for every purchase, I think these people are highly sophisticated, and probably are using bots to create many disposable email addresses, and possibly zombie machines to "proxy" to magnatune, thereby using a different tcpip address every time. There was no geographical pattern to the fraud.

Eventually, the fraudsters found our "gift card" sales page, which allowed them to put in whatever dollar amount they wanted. Not limited to $8 purchases, they started hitting us with huge numbers of $100 gift cards. That really started to upset VISA.

Meanwhile, VISA was telling us that they would drop us if we didn't become PCI Compliant. The main thing that PCI Compliance requires of you is to not permanently store the credit cards you receive, but instead to pass them onto your VISA processor and then get a "customer code" back from the processor, and use that in the future. That's fine, and a good idea, since it helps prevent the case where your computer is hacked and all your VISA card numbers are stolen.

However, PCI compliance would do absolutely nothing for us in stopping the daily deluge of fraudulent transactions. When someone has the visa number, CVV number and postal address, the charge is going to go through, and the fact that the card is stolen isn't anything VISA can deal with. What is needed is a personal PIN, like they have in Europe for in-person charges, so that a stolen card can't be used without the PIN number. The "Verified by Visa" program does that over the web, which is great, and some processors support it (ours didn't)

In the end, VISA wasn't happy with my answer that "PCI Compliance won't stop this fraud" and so they dropped us.

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Implications

For one-time purchases of downloads and CDs, there isn't much of a difference. Your purchase gets routed to paypal for credit card processing, instead of our doing it.

For memberships, we can now only take paypal members. If you already have a paypal membership, this is no hardship. If you don't have a paypal membership, you can open one fairly quickly with your credit card.

Unfortunately, the linux programs Amarok and Rhythmbox no longer can buy Magnatune music directly. Those programs allowed you to purchase music by supplying your credit card, and that no longer works. We're working on a different purchasing pathway for those two programs, so that their next versions will allow purchasing again, but in a different way that doesn't involve putting your credit card number in their software.

The biggest implications for us are financial.

We're seeing about 1/3rd drop in membership revenue because of the change, which is unfortunate.

Also annoying is that the VISA processor put our account "on hold" for two months before finally firing us. During that two month period, they didn't pay us at all. After they cancelled our account, they didn't pay us either. So, we're due two full months of revenue from our VISA processor.

What they've told us is that they're going to hold all the funds for 6 months, at the end of which they'll decide how much they want to keep for possible future chargebacks, and pay us the rest. There doesn't seem to be any transparency on this process, and the processor is being quite vague about how it works.

I've just gone through a royalty payment cycle for my musicians. Despite not actually getting paid for 2 of the 6 months, I decided to pay the musicians now for the sales that occurred. Why? Because musicians are among those most affected by the slow economy, and I hope to eventually get the money from VISA. If after 6 months' waiting, VISA decides to not pay us for those 2 months of sales, I will fight it (after all, they're just keeping our money), but I'm hoping that won't happen.

The good news is that I got a call from Paypal shortly after being cancelled by VISA. They were notified about our being cancelled, and so they reviewed our account. They didn't see a security risk with how we run things, and we're able to continue using them. Paypal's fraud department were quite sympathetic to the merchant's problem of targeted fraud, which was a nice change.

So, if you're wondering why we had a lull in new releases for about 2 months, that's the reason... Now, we're back on track and the backlogged releases are coming out on expedited schedule.

-john

Wax Mp3 launches with Magnatune tracks

The irrepressible Lucas Gonze is back from a few years absence with a new project, "Wax Mp3".

Wax MP3 Launched yesterday with the full Magnatune catalog as its music source.

You can see (and listen) to it here.

Lucas tells me that the goal behind the Wax Mp3 site is to be an extremely minimal radio station. You visit the site, it plays music. If you don't like the current song, his "reload" on your browser and you get a new one. Simple idea: just play me music! I like it.

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Lucas is of course, the creator of WebJay, which was a really wonderful make-and-share-playlists-of-web-music site. Magnatune was a big supporter (I think we advertised on it, actually) because it helped people find the best of open and shareable music. Yahoo acquired webjay in 2006, and then shut it down 18 months later (sigh).

Lucas also originated the XSPF open audio playlist format, which Magnatune supports. This then helped cause the creation of the XSPF Flash Audio Player, which Magnatune used for many years. We now use a Flash player derived from it maintained by the Ampache project.

Anyhow, that's all to say that whatever Lucas does, you can bet it will be interesting. Check out "Wax Mp3" as another approach to finding something to listen to.

B&O Beomaster includes magnatune music

Bang & Olufsen's new product--the "Beomaster 5"--comes pre-filled with a variety of Magnatune music. This allows anyone who buys a Beomaster to listen right away. It also means that Magnatune music will be played in Bang & Olufsen stores around the world when demonstrating this new product.

The Magnatune music included on the Beomaster is:

* Barbara Leoni - Don't rain on my parade
* Falling You - Shadow Child
* Five Star Fall - Headphones
* John Williams - Dusty Porch
* Myles Cochran - Hidden
* Norine Braun - Give Me Love
* Shane Jackman - What I did on my summer vacation
* The Headroom Project - Yesterday
* The Seldon Plan - Westchester

B&O have indicated that they'll probably be adding to the included songs over time. They sell quite a few of these to high end hotels, which is another way people will find out about our music (you can listen in your room).