More MP3tunes.com details & nitpicks

Got an email from Derek Sivers at CD Baby regarding MP3tunes. Turns out MP3tunes was listed as "Lindows" on the companies my album had been shipped to, so that explains that. Also it looks like the catalog is exclusively CD Baby artists and Derek says the artist cut is "the usual 65 cents per song, $6.50 per full-album", which is higher than it says in the FAQ and would be as high a cut as iTunes despite the purchase price being lower.

A cool feature: "All music purchased at MP3tunes remains in the user's "Music Locker" so they can enjoy unlimited download access to their MP3tunes music library from any web browser at anytime. There is no additional charge for users to re-download their music from their Music Locker."

Express URLs are handy AND dandy: http://www.mp3tunes.com/BradSucks

I played around with it a little more and here's my list of usability complaints:

• Titles and artist names are truncated too heavily, widen it up. (As ranted a bit more about here.)
• The horizontal sliding browsing thing, while cute, isn't user friendly. It's annoying to look through large lists. And combined with the tiny title length, I can barely read a full title anyway.
• When I click on preview links in Firefox I'm prompted to download the 30 second mp3 clip and then need to go open it manually. It shouldn't be hard to make this stream automatically.
• Severely limited number of CDs it shows me on genre pages, unless you count ones you see when you horizontally browse, which I don't because it's annoying.

All of those points make for a pretty crummy browsing experience and seem like easy things to change.