An update. Hitting some more black and blue notes.
A-sharp: One of the readers of the previous article, Dusk411, agreed and commented that particularly 80s music is hard to find. Most of the older music I looked for myself is 80s music, so we have a match here. Ironically, the founder of the OD2 download service, Peter Gabriel, is very much an 80s musician and also an artist I respect greatly for both his music and his attitude.
Sure enough, his work is on OD2 in its entirety, but if you want an example of artist who is on Itunes and isn't on OD2, it's Sevara Nazarkhan, an Uzbek female singer promoted by Gabriel's record company and whom I actually discovered on Itunes during a brief experiment with that service (the Itunes program refused to work on my machine after a short while, and anyway, with me being a bloody foreigner, the voucher I got for my birthday wasn't accepted, so much for Apple user-friendliness).
C-sharp: Just in today was the news that Download.nl, a Dutch download portal, will switch from OD2 to Lyzia, a lesser known download service. Download.nl hopes that Lyzia will be more flexible than OD2. OD2 was taken over by an American company with a "can't be bothered" attitude for foreign local market opportunities. Meanwhile I went through the list of Dutch artists on my own OD2-powered provider, and it showed the same lack of involvement on the content level. I can't say that I care much about Dutch music, but there are more than just this handful, and some of the really important ones are missing.
D-sharp: How do you define 'World Music'? Music by and for the people? Music with its roots in local, non-classical traditions? Non-western music? If you count in all non-western music from Asian and African ethnic to tango, salsa and Irish folk, do you have to count in German Schlager too? I must say I was surprised if not annoyed to discover the likes of grandmother's favorite Heintje Davids and Johan Heesters in OD2's category of 'World Music'. Come to think of it, I'd define World Music as music with its roots in regional traditions. I'm not so snobbish to dismiss all German music - if there's a particular way of making folksy music in the Bavarian Alps and it's being represented by the Schnetzelbacher Lederklatschbuben (I'm making that one up), welcome to the party, but if there's anyone still listening to Heintje or Heesters, they're just as likely to living in Hamburg as in Munich, and their roots are somewhere in the offices of some record company. In fact, they're not very German at all - they were Dutch. Now, there's an easy way to beef up your World Music list. You might as well include Country & Western, Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck, the French chanson ...
F-sharp: Dusk411 mentioned the poor quality of the 30 second samples on Amazon. I've been using them and I buy a lot from Amazon (shiny RL cdroms in neat jewel cases, not the virtual, licensed stuff), but quality is a problem there. Does a record sound lousy by itself or is it just the sample? This brings us to another problem:
G-Sharp: It's worse if you don't have any samples at all - I haven't been able to use samples on OD2 since my internet provider switched to UDP. I may not be a wizzkid, but after being an technically-minded PC-user for more than 15 years, I more or less know my way about. Itunes stopped working shortly after I used it, and now the digital music bit of Windows Media Player went the same way for a crucial part. I still have some precious euros on my user account, but I can't do much with them; the files that I've downloaded are on a mysterious place on my HD (until the next crash or major software error) and I don't like it all. I wish the digital music shops were a little bit less obsessed with implementing air-tight DRM and a little bit more interested in providing a stable, easy to use product.
Jarring final chord: Worst of all, before the sample feature went down, there wasn't really anything I wanted to buy, as much as I was eager to spent some money.
SSR