I paid 5 pounds plus the transaction fee on October 3rd, pre-ordering the new album. However, I did not receive an email from WASTE (Radiohead’s merch arm) with my activation code. I emailed them and asked what was up, and got an auto reply as follows:
“Thank you for your message.
Here is some information which may answer your question….
If you are having problems placing an order please check that your
cookies are enabled. You may need to try a new browser and you may need to use a new e-mail address if you failed to place an order with your original e-mail address. You can track successful orders by following this link.http://www.inrainbows.com/Members
If you are yet to receive your activation code (please check your spam
filters) or are having download problems please e-mail
downloadinrainbows@waste.uk.comPlease contact us again next week with any Discbox postal address
changes.”
After checking my spam folder on gmail, I found some other mail I should have gotten, but not one from WASTE. I emailed them back saying
“Hey there,
My order number was xxxxxxxxx. I never received an email with my activation link. I did look and search my spam folder an it was not filtered. I just never got it.
Plus, I’ve been going to the website all day to try and just buy it straight away again and it just grinds and grinds. I’m pretty disappointed.
Given that I now am a whole day late getting the album, I’d say that diminishes the value of the pre-order by a third. Having given 5.45 quid for it, I’d like some of the money back as well.”
Which I feel is fair–I really didn’t get the album when I was supposed to, and I felt like a large part of my payment was the immediacy of availability.
Well, I received an email back within three minutes from waste with an activation code to try. I clicked it and immediately was able to download the album.
I’m ready to listen, but had to get this out of the way first. 160kbps is too low of a bit-rate for something like this. 192kbps is the minimum anyone should be encoding music at this point, and it is really silly think that this would be about bandwidth. Bandwidth costs very little these days, so I consider this electronic delivery to be below standard.
Overall this would have been fine, except the inrainbows.com website has been down all day, and the pages I was able to get to load had no contact us or faq. Clearly from the email and the quickness of their response they are aware that some people did not properly receive their activation code after paying for it. The whole thing seems kind of bungled, and this isn’t even complicated technology