I have to say that the writing has been on the wall from the day that I signed up when I was told by the person who sold me the service that their business model assumed that people would download only 300 tracks in their years subscription but that the average was running at 700 tracks. An all that you can eat download service is bound to appeal to those that like to download and so 300 tracks was always going to be a low target. I know that in the ten months I have the service I downloaded many more than both their 300 estimate and the 700 higher level.

On the one hand I am sorry for Datz as I know how difficult it can be for a small business to make it but then again they promised much and delivered little.

After reading the post Datz contacted me to say that a number of my points would be addressed “within the month or so”. That would have been sometime in June and it is now August and there is no sign of any improvements.

Today things got a whole lot worse with the service not working fully. When you try and look at any artist listing you get the following SQL error message, which means that it is impossible to download anything:

SELECT SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS SQL_CACHE DISTINCT title,artist,thumblmage,brand,productlD,digitalPreview,digitallnfoo9, uc FROM products WHERE artist = ‘Iggy Pop’ AND title! =“ AND productType=’Track’ AND C digitallnfoo9 = ‘247’ and digitallnfoo7 <unix_timestamp (nowO) and supplier = ‘EMI’) OR ( digitallnfoog = ‘247’ supplier =‘Warner Music Group (247 Lic)’) ORDER BY title LIMIT 0,15

What’s interesting about this SQL statement is two things.

Firstly, there is an incredibly simple error in the statement. The last part of the statement:

OR ( digitallnfoog = ‘247’ supplier =‘Warner Music Group (247 Lic)’) ORDER BY title LIMIT 0,15

Should read:

OR ( digitallnfoog = ‘247’ and supplier =‘Warner Music Group (247 Lic)’) ORDER BY title LIMIT 0,15

Datz, you can have that fix on me.

The second interesting point is what the SQL is saying. Effectively it is restricting the search to anything from either the EMI or Warner Music Group catalogues. Which sort of implies that other catalogues are there but just hidden. I still hold out hope that the other majors will be added before the end of my subscription and that the artists that were removed (Genesis, Crowded House, Peter Gabriel to name a few) are restored.