The Butt Ugly Weblog

The Ground heads for the sky

The son of Levyvirasto, The Ground is here. And I like it.

It's the first, proper Finnish music store. It has a decent, web-based UI which works on my Mac, and it sells me DRM-free MP3s (which work nicely both on my laptop, desktop, iPod and my phone - which cannot be said on the offerings of the iTunes Music Store or the Nokia Music Store) of good quality with a price I'm willing to pay. There's also enough bandwidth - I get a full album in a minute.

There are still some flaws: The UI does not really promote music discovery (I would very much like to see a tie-in with the open APIs of Last.fm, for example), the selection is still not yet quite complete, the download was broken the first time (though it worked flawlessly the second time) and I do believe that Meat Loaf should not be classified as "classical music". But, as a whole, this is the first music store selling major brand music that I can see myself visiting more than once (many of the ones in the US refuse to sell to Europe, unfortunately). Spent 20+ euros in it in a flash (a Poets of the Fall album, a couple of tracks from Pet Shop Boys, and Kylie's X, if you absolutely want to know. Which you probably didn't - but now you know something you didn't know a moment earlier, and that in itself is valuable to realize.)

More of this, please. And preferably in a global scale; the whole notion of limiting music licensing to a single country sounds like exactly the kind of stuff that EU was established to abolish.