Not in those shoes, mate…
This might actually qualify as the dumbest online music business act of stupidity I have yet encountered. And that’s really saying something.
This is the sort of web design over which people should not only lose their jobs, but be disbarred or whatever the web equivalent of having your medical practitioner’s licence revoked might be.
RipIt.co.nz is apparently a new-ish online music store in New Zealand that has its origins in Australia, where the iPod is now all but illegal.
I say “apparently”, because they won’t let me in dressed like this. You see, I use Firefox and I refuse to install the extension that downgrades my browser to the extent that it resembles Internet Explorer.
And you there with the Mac? Piss off. We don’t like your sort either.
Thank You for visiting the Ripit Music Store. We are pleased to inform you that the Ripit Music Store is compatible with Firefox. If you are using Mozilla Firefox, please click here to view the step by step guide on how to enable Firefox to use the Ripit Music Store. If you are using a browser other than IE or Firefox, the Ripit Music Store is unfortunately not compatible with your browser. Please click here to download Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or here to download Mozilla Firefox. We regret that Ripit Music Store does not support Macintosh platform.
Morons!
Oh, and word has it that they will only let you download DRM-crippled WMA files.
Do NOT give these people your money. It makes them think that this kind of anti-consumer crap is okay. The only way they could possibly alienate more potential users of their site and make the whole thing less attractive is if they instigated some sort of voucher system that encouraged you to pre-pay, and then set it up so that your credit expired after a few months, whether you’d spent it or not.
Oh, hang on…
5 Comments, Comment or Ping
Dubber
For further reading…
Article in the National Business Review about RipIt here.
Nov 29th, 2006
Mikhail Alexandrovich
are they a funded project?
Nov 29th, 2006
Maxrock
yep, im a Mac user with Firefox, how stupid of them. It’s browser discrimination
Nov 30th, 2006
Stephen Ballantyne
I completely agree with you.
Comfort yourself with the thought that you’re not missing much.
They can’t keep Mac users out — flipping swiftly to IE 7 on my nice new BlackBook (thanks to Parallels, VirtueDesktops and a copy of Windows XP some friendly chap at Microsoft gave me — yes, they’re giving XP away now, or perhaps its just to me) I find that RipIt.co.nz is indeed a pathetic load of rubbish.
Awful typography, a design straight out of the 1990s packed with tables and hardly a DIV in sight, and an utterly dismal and disorganised selection of music: Canned Heat in the Jazz section? Phillip Glass listed under ‘P’, Franz Schubert listed under ‘F’? No World or Alternative categories? No Steve Reich or Terry Riley? Where’s that long tail? “Best of British” headed by Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights? Wasn’t that what they were playing when I was young?
It’s very, very sad, it’s completely irrelevant to the lives of music consumers, and I won’t be mentioning it in my contributions to the NBR, which are entirely confined to the print edition.
If I’m passing Dick Smith’s I might pop in to see how hard they’re pushing their voucher scheme, though.
Nov 30th, 2006
Nessi
This sux bad I am in Australia and have been trying for two days to get the song I brought off the site onto my computer and I have downloaded all the crap they wanted me to and I still cant get the songs I have paid for. And there are no phone numbers and they just keep telling me its my problem to bad figure it out!!
Mar 1st, 2007
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