The food of love (musicroom.com)

Member Name: MaryanneH

Product:	musicroom.com
Date:	13/03/06 (102 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: quick, efficient

Disadvantages: very hard to browse

As more and more independent stores go out of business, one of the often unnoticed victims of the ever decreasing high street is the local music shop. As a kid I spent many hours in the music shop, browsing through the sheet music, playing on the pianos’ and generally making a nuisance of myself. Now as an adult and a piano teacher, the lack of somewhere to browse is a real problem, my nearest store now is in Bristol, which is a 35 minute motorway journey away, and it may shortly be subject to a congestion charge.

So in search for an alternative I came across musicroom.com.

The Site

As an online shop musicroom.com, is very well set out and easy to navigate. It is very similar to Amazon in its layout; in fact it is practically identical to how Amazon looked a couple of years ago.

The general selection criteria on the site is set out into: songbooks and sheet music, tuition books, books for schools, instructional DVDs and videos, books about music, music software and instruments and accessories.

Searching is very easy, you can either browse through the particular instrument section that you are interested in. However as you can imagine, with a popular instrument like the piano the ‘piano and keyboard section’ turns out in the region of 20000 items. You can narrow this down to searching through specific teaching methods, or if you know exactly what you looking for searching on the composer and title. The searching is fairly forgiving with its spelling, which with regularly mis-spelt composers like Liszt is a good thing.

Naturally the popular choices (usually chart albums songbooks) are well displayed on the opening page.

The service

Like other shop sites, they give you an idea of how long you can expect to wait for your music. Most items are usually dispatched within 24 hours. However, there will always be the inevitable delays on other things. Usually these are the things I am most desperate for, for example one of my students has chosen to do a Beethoven sonata for a performance exam, and as it wasn’t one of the 3 main ones that everyone wants to play, it has been delayed, despite the fact that it was showing a 24 hour dispatch. It arrives very well packaged with a nice printed VAT receipt which keeps the tax man happy and is far easier to read than any from a high street shop, and I have often received the goods before the confirmation email saying they have been sent.

Paying is done through what has become a fairly standard, secure checkout pages with a credit or debit card.

The true test of any company’s service is how good they are when things go wrong. On one occasion I received a book that had 4 pages out of 32 inside, completely blank,. I emailed them and they immediately replaced it, without even requiring that I returned the original, which despite the missing pages I have still managed to make good use of.

They are also very flexible as once I had forgotten to order an item and they were happy to add it on over the telephone. Although, they do seem to have got bigger just recently so they may not be able to do this any more.

Postage and discounts

Postage on the site is free for an order over £15, for orders under it is £1.99 for first class, or £3.78 if it is sent express.

As you have gathered I have used this company regularly over a prolonged period, and one of the benefits of being a music teacher with a regular store is they will often offer teachers discount. Musicroom have recently introduced this and ‘educators’ can apply for a 10% discount on orders over £25.

Price wise musicroom is about the same as the highstreet.

The problem with browsing

There was an article in the paper this week that said men were more likely to shop online than women as women prefer the social aspect of shopping. Now I’m not going to dispute that, but for me one of the problems of shopping online is I like to feel and see what I am buying. Naturally as a teacher, 90% of things I buy through musicroom.com are books that I have used before and am completely familiar with so know what I am getting. However one of the biggest problems with buying music is whether it is suitable in standard for the musician its intended for. So musicroom.com has put a ‘standard indicator’ against each item, where they know it. This indicator goes from 0 to 5, which to be honest, isn’t really that helpful as the standards can vary so widely. To give a rough idea I will relate them to the Associated Board graded exam pieces.

Grades 1 – 3 skill level 2,
Grades 4 – 5 skill level 3,
Grades 6, skill level 4,
Grades 7 and above, skill level 5

As you can see the standards vary greatly, there is a fairly big difference between grades 1 and 3 and very few grade 7 standard players could tackle Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata, but the level would be the same.

Stock availability

When I first started using the site any early popular tutor books would be easy to get hold of but anything slightly out of the ordinary would not be available. Recently this has not been a problem and I can now get practically everything I need for solo piano, but duets and trios can still be fairly meagre pickings.

They do stock a small supply of musical instruments, but these are things I would not buy over the internet as you really do have to feel and play any musical instrument before committing money to it.

Downsides

One of the biggest downsides of shopping online for anything is not being offered bargains. When the music software Sibelius introduced Sibelius version 4 I was desperately searching the internet for cheap copies of version 3, but sadly I couldn’t find anything so am still struggling away with a cheap substitute.

So in conclusion, musicroom.com is a very practical, user friendly shop for musicians. I use it largely for convenience, and I genuinely miss the chance to really browse, but on the upside they can get most things to you very quickly. A site like this could mean that as a teacher you become set in your ways never really discovering any new material. So I do make the effort to find a proper music shop whenever possible as a bored teacher is an ineffective one.

Thank you for reading

Summary: Sheet music online.