Filling in the blanks on iTunes

Published on 31^st March 2009 in Usability, tagged iTunes, Last.fm, music.

These days, I get most of my music from the iTunes Store. It’s quick, convenient, reasonably priced and you can listen to music before you buy it. Although I usually shop around for goods, when it comes to music, iTunes is the only place I go. However, when I can’t find what I’m looking for, the user experience falls apart and they lose my custom. Let’s take a look at an example to see why.

The first point of contact when it comes to buying new music often isn’t iTunes, but Last.fm. Its recommendation system is far more comprehensive and accurate than iTunes’, so I usually discover new artists there. For this walkthrough, we’ll take Sarah Blasko, an Australian singer who I found a few months ago.

Sometimes I’ll listen to an artist’s songs on Last.fm, but usually I’ll search for them in iTunes instead because it’s either already open or because I’m at work where Last.fm’s Flash player is blocked. Although you can navigate to a lot of music without it, iTunes’ search is my main method for finding artists.

There are only two versions of one song in the UK store.

However, when we search for Sarah Blasko on iTunes, it only gives us a single song. This is initially confusing, because Last.fm lists at least a couple of her albums. When I saw this for the first time, I switched to the Australian iTunes store to check that her music was on there. Sure enough, all of her albums were present and some even had specialised artwork on their pages.

However, there’s plenty in the Australia store.

At this point, I had no option but to look elsewhere for the music I wanted. Any sale that I might have made was gone. However, Apple has little or no idea that these kind of interactions are taking place. At best, their analytics show someone leaving, but not the reason for it.

So how would you solve this problem and improve the customer experience on iTunes? I would add a link to search result and artist pages, saying something along the lines of “looking for something that’s missing?” Clicking on this would provide customers with a short feedback form allowing them to request the music that they expected to be there. This would close the feedback loop to Apple and allow them to guage demand for absent artists and albums.

Doing something like this is made easier in the case of artists like Sarah Blasko, where they’re only represented in some national stores. If the Australian iTunes has her music, then the system is aware of it and this data could be put to good use. Imagine doing a search for her work in the UK iTunes Store and the songs in the Australian one were shown, but greyed out. Instead of a ‘buy’ link, there would be a ‘request’ one and perhaps it could email you if the music becomes available.

A solution to this problem might look like this.

Allowing customers to request music instead of showing them a blank won’t make an immediate impact on iTunes’ sales, but it would provide them with invaluable data. If a record label was reluctant to release music outside of a single country, then this system would give them the metrics with which to make a valid decision. It would also close the feedback loop between iTunes and its customers, and potentially lead to new sales in the future.