A bit more than OK - musica.co.uk (musica.co.uk)

Member Name: hugon

Product:	musica.co.uk
Date:	28/08/01 (110 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great range, Good prices, Friendly and helpful customer services

Disadvantages: Slow delivery, Little imformation about each product

The first thing I thought when I came across this site was eek! (To quote sunbeam). The front page is a little overbearing for my tastes. Granted, it is well laid out, with clear navigation down both the right and left hand sides, easy access to your account via a menu bar at the top of the screen. It keeps this rigid formula throughout your navigation of the site, making it very easy to find your way around the site and making it difficult to get lost.

The main body of the site, down the centre is where the main content is kept. On the main page, this consists of highlighted albums in each category, or if you are browsing the site, this is where the search results or charts are displayed. Once you start to navigate the site, you’ll be impressed at just how quick the site is; it’s certainly one of the fastest online sites I’ve come across in my experience. It does this by keeping graphics to an absolute minimum, there are only small (60x60) pixels pictures of the album cover, and these are only for a small amount of the albums, as many albums don’t have cover pictures at all. Similarly, the information about each album is quite light as well – especially with pre order albums, where there sometimes isn’t even a track list.

The site is organised differently to most online music stores I’m used to. It’s a lot more specialised than the likes of Amazon or Audiostreet and doesn’t hide the Jazz or Classical albums away out of sight, instead they are given pride of place amongst the more popular titles, and it’s pleasing to see the availability of spoken word titles as well.

If you want to browse by looking through the charts, the UK Top 40 albums is displayed, but a novel feature is that you can also select the top 40 albums right back to 1997, as well as looking at the top 500 classical albums of all time, 50 top Jazz albums and 500 top pop albums. They also have the winners and nomina
ted acts from the awards of this and last year – the Q awards, Brits and Mercury Prize, if you’re looking to catch up with some award winning music, but don’t have a clue who won the awards, it couldn’t be easier. The site also carries the reviewed and recommended released from the main classical magazines – BBC Music, Classic FM and Gramophone. It’s great to see this level of detail taken on the site so that if you read about an album in a magazine but couldn’t remember what it was (if you where reading in a shop for instance), all you need to do is click the relevant link on the site.

If you want to browse by category (for instance pop), all you need to do is select the link from the navigation menu at the side, then choose your sub genre from the comprehensive list on the resulting page. It’s a bit difficult to navigate this way, as there doesn’t seem to be a definite pattern to the way the albums are displayed, but useful if you’re not really sure what you’re looking for.

The search mode is what you’re going to use if you know exactly what you’re looking for, type the artist or name into the box on the right of the page, click go and the results page comes up almost instantly. It’s the search that makes you appreciate just how comprehensive the site is, it had everything I was looking for and more besides. I through the Reindeer Section, Strokes, Snow Patrol, Lush, Green Day, JJ72 and Therapy at it to try and catch it out, but to no avail, I was amazed. The index page made me think this site would be for mainly classical and jazz, but not so.

This brings me on to the prices. The prices display includes Vat, but not postage, which cost an extra £1 on top of your order. The prices are highly favourable, at £10 for new releases, which isn’t as cheap as CD-WOW, but more or less beats everywhere else I can think of. The £10 is mostly across the board f
or new releases, whether you’re destined to go into the top 10 of the chart or not. Older releases can go up to £12, but the prices are among the cheapest I’ve seen on the Internet, these people are very hard to beat on price.

Delivery is clearly stated on the albums information page, and ranges from 24 hours or 2-3 days for an in stock album, or up to two weeks if the album is out of stock. Delivery tracking is available from your account section, simply log in to view the status of your order. It gives an estimated delivery date, which I found to be a little on the optimistic side, my CD didn’t arrive until a few days after the date on site, but it is updated to say when your CD has been dispatched. I would have liked an email on dispatch of my order, instead of having to log into the site everyday, but perhaps they’ll add something like that in the future.

To order from the site, you must have an account, where you need to enter your delivery details and name and email address. This will save you having to enter your delivery information with every order you make. Once you have made your selection and added them to your basket, you can proceed to the checkout. You can pay by Visa, MasterCard, Switch or you can post them a cheque. You will have to enter your credit card details with every order you make, as the site does not store your credit card information on it’s site. Once your card has been accepted, they give an invoice on screen, which you can print out for your records, and they dispatch an email to your account with the details of your order.

I placed my order on the 15th of August, and received my CD on 25th August, which was longer than the 2-3 days stated on my CD’s page. A day or two of that was due to my own stupidity when entering my details (see later in opinion), but that still makes roughly a week for delivery – the CD’s information page stated the CD I wanted was in sto
ck. I have to say that I was a little disappointed with that, but the CD did come securely packaged in a cardboard sleeve, and the CD case was in pristine condition.

A nice touch at the checkout is the ability to select how much of your credit you use. Your credit is any gift vouchers or promotional discounts you have. If you have chosen a CD for £6 and you have £10 of credit, you don’t need to select something else to bring the price up, nor do you need to waste your credit all at once – you simply elect to use £6 of your discount and save £4 for your next opportunity. Because of this, credit isn’t applied at the checkout like most online stores; instead you add it in your account section once you have created your account.

As well as standard browsing, you can also browse featured artists – for instance, at the minute they have a Beatles feature on site, where you can read a brief history of the Beatles, with links to their back catalogue. Not only do they have these features, but they also have news and reviews content on site, which is provided from outside sites like Antimusic and the NME. They really do seem to have all bases covered, this makes the site more of a portal than a shopping site at times, and it’s refreshing to see them putting up some content rather than constantly trying to flog you stuff.

There was a problem with my order, more specifically with the expiration date of my credit card (I think I entered the starting date rather than the expiry, silly me). A nice lady from the customer services emailed me when my order was ready for dispatch to tell me the problem, and asking me to email her my expiry date, she then emailed me back within a few hours to tell me it had been sorted and my CD was on it’s way.

The important question is – would I use them again, and the answer is yes. They definitely seem to be cheaper than Amazon and audiostreet, even with postage added on,
and CD Wow often doesn’t stock what I’m looking for, so I think they could have a regular customer of their hands. Saying that, I wouldn’t use them for new releases unless they could speed up their delivery process significantly.

They also have a Dividica.co.uk site doing the same thing with DVD’s if DVDs are more your bag. The site is impressively speedy, the selection of music is comprehensive and the prices match. It’s a little known site that a lot more people should find out about, and hopefully they’ll be as impressed as I was.

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