Exchange Your FlyBuys for Music Downloads
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If you’re a music fan with a stash of unused FlyBuys points, you’ll be happy to hear that you can now exchange your points for music downloads, from the new Coles Music Store. But is the store any good?
My FlyBuys November points summary statement arrived by email a few days ago, confirming a total of 2,660 points, and encouraging me to redeem them for a $20 FlyBuys Gift Card.
I was all set to click and redeem 2,500 points for a $20 gift card, when I spotted a much better deal, a special launch offer for Coles Music, giving me $30 of music downloads for only 1,900 points.
The new Coles Music store has just launched, with 3 million tracks from over 100,000 different artists, available to download in high quality (256kbps or 320kbps DRM-free) MP3 format.
Coles Music has been listed as a new online reward for the FlyBuys shopping rewards program, with a special music downloads launch offer running until 31 December 2011.
You don’t have to use your Coles Music rewards just for yourself either, you can also gift them as music vouchers, or albums. If you do have a lot of FlyBuys points, this could be an excellent money-saving Christmas gift idea for your family and friends. As I write this however, the option to gift music is not accessible, but vouchers are available for $20, $30, $50, and $100.
You can start browsing and searching for albums and tracks at the Coles Music store first, and add them to your cart, before you even think about exchanging your rewards for Coles Music downloads — this is what I did actually, just to make sure I wasn’t wasting my points.
When you are ready to exchange your points for a Coles Music voucher, go the FlyBuys Coles Music page and sign in. Once you’ve done that, just hit the Redeem button, submit your details and confirm. I did all this, and within 60 seconds I had received an email confirming the points redemption, and a Coles Music voucher code. With your voucher code copied to the clipboard you can head on over to the Coles Music store.
When you arrive at Coles Music you’ll need to login or register as a new user. Once you’ve done that you can click on the ‘Enter Voucher Code’ button in the top left corner, then paste your code and click ‘Submit’ to redeem. Your account balance in the top right hand corner of the page should now display $30.
Your account balance is adjusted automatically as you add items to your cart, and if you exceed the account credit like I did, you can pay the balance by credit card when you checkout — for me that turned out to be just 18c.
I enjoy listening to music, and I only buy digital music online (I stopped buying CDs about 3 years ago), so for me, exchanging my unused FlyBuys points for some MP3s was a no-brainer. I must say however, that as a regular shopper at the Apple iTunes Store (109 albums downloaded in the last 3 years ), the shopping experience at Coles Music was rather disappointing.
First of all, Coles Music only has 3 million songs, compared to iTunes 12 million, that number will probably improve over time of course, but right now the selection is rather limited.
To give you an example, I searched and could not find a Radiohead remix album (Tkol Rmx1234567) released in October this year, the soundtrack to ‘The Social Network’ by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, or The Complete Dollars Trilogy soundtrack by Ennio Morricone — 3 items currently on my iTunes wish list.
Pre-order albums don’t appear to be listed at all, my searches for the new Amy Winehouse album Lioness: Hidden Treasures, and Gorillaz The Singles Collection (2001-2011), proved fruitless.
Searching for albums and artists in the Coles Music Store was often painfully slow, and coupled with the frequent no-match results, I found myself getting annoyed quickly.
iTunes song previews were recently upped to 60 seconds, but unfortunately Coles Music is still stuck at 30 seconds.
It’s not all bad news mind you, many of the albums I did find were about $1 cheaper than iTunes on average, and there is a nice selection of albums under $10.
Individual songs are priced between $1.61 and $2.11, compared with $1.19-$2.19 in iTunes.
With Mylo Xyloto by Coldplay for $16.99, and the Inception soundtrack by Hans Zimmer for $13.19 in my cart, I proceeded to checkout.
I’d love to tell you that the download of my newly purchased MP3s was easy and trouble free, but unfortunately it wasn’t.
After your order is confirmed you get a prompt to download your music, with a choice of using a single or multi track downloader. I choose the multi track downloader because I thought it would be quicker, but it turned out to be a bit of a pain, because I got a prompt to install Java Runtime on my Mac, and had to wait 5 mins for that to download and install before I could continue.
The MP3 tracks downloaded pretty fast, but rather annoyingly they were not grouped into album folders — although that’s not a problem if you are going to import them into iTunes of course.
A final bee in my bonnet occurred after importing the MP3s into iTunes, when one of the Coldplay tracks (featuring Rihanna) was displayed as a separate album. This would not happen if the MP3s had the correct album artist information — anyway, it was easy to fix manually, but still a pain.
Music downloads are available to access for 30 days only, unlike iTunes, which stores all your purchases in iCloud for you, with no time limits or restrictions.
If the sole reason for the existence of the Coles Music store, is to redeem FlyBuys points, then comparisons with iTunes are a bit unfair I suppose, but as a standalone digital music store, it offers a subpar experience.
If it wasn’t a FlyBuys online reward, I would not choose to buy and download music from the Coles Music store, but as the only option to exchange my points for music downloads, I’ll use it.
My last thought on the matter is, why didn’t FlyBuys do a deal with Apple, and offer $30 iTunes gift vouchers in exchange for 1,900 points? Then there’d be no reason for Coles Music to exist, and customers would get better value for money, and a much better online shopping experience.
What are your thoughts on Coles Music and FlyBuys, are you going to redeem your points for music downloads?
