MSN Music user reviews

4.5 stars

"Lots of songs,great sound quailty" on October 21, 2005 by Greg465

Pros: Lots of songz! 100 timez better then i-tunes

Cons: Use's IE,need its own program,search is bad too

Summary: It also need a subcription serivce too!

4.5 stars

"fast and intuitive" on September 14, 2005 by ridgerock

Pros: most tracks downloaded in 10-15 sec.

Cons: some obscure music not available

1.0 stars

"Misleading service" on July 27, 2005 by mr_rational

Pros: Easy download

Cons: Misleading advertising;Horrid support

Summary: I've been a user of Hotmail for many years and so was pleasantly surpised to see an e-mail from MSN saying it had opened a Music Service and was giving 5 songs free if I bought one. The e-mail said I could avail of the 5 free songs by Sept 30. I finally did the needful and set up my account and downloaded one song. Lo and Behold! the promised 5 never materialised.

Then began my run around with the support. First I e-mailed them. Apparently they couldn't fix the problem because my account details could not be handled over e-mail (it's only my e-mail address - how hard can that be?) and got sent to a chat session. That refused to work despite my stubborn efforts to get someone. I e-mailed them back and finally was given a telephone number to call.

After waiting 5 minutes I finally got to a rep who after due inquiry said I had to have opened the account by July 10 (I did it on the 24th). But this was nowhere in the body of the ad that I got on hotmail. The rep bade me to read all over the e-mail and sure enough it's there in the fine print. Why not put this in the body of the ad (after all the Sep 30 date is so prominent) if not to mislead consumers? The rep was adamant that he could do nothing for me as it was mentioned somewhere in the e-mail. So being a logical type of person I asked for a refund.

This takes the cake. He tells me no level 2 specialists are available to talk to me and they are the only ones who can give me a refund. I says there must be some of them and they must be talking to someone so why not me? He says that I'd have to call back the next day! I ask him if there's no queue that I can get into and he says all the queues are full and that he sees something on his screen that says so and so , sorry you can't even get on a queue to ask for a refund (let alone get it)! This is the last straw for me.

But not for him. As I vent slightly he tells me to give feedback on the MSN site (amazing suggestion). I tell him if he's right there, a rep of the great Microsoft and he can do nothing to make me happy, why on earth would my leaving feedback with MSN make any difference? To top it all off, he says, well, at least it will keep you satisfied (satisfied? satisfied? has the word lost its meaning?).

And so here I am dear readers. This is the only way to get the word out and to stop this kind of nonsense. Please be aware that if you make a mistake with MSN, there's not going to be any support for you and certainly not any "customer service" oriented support.

4.5 stars

"slow out of the gates, but clean and worthy" on June 13, 2005 by wooman7

Pros: clean, quick, tons of music, non-proprietary file format

Cons: nothing different, better search needed

Summary: I am pleased overall with MSN's version of music service. I like that I can use it with any device - the file format is not proprietary as with iPod. But, I can't use it with an iPod - touche.
Good UI, need a bit better Search facility, but overall a good start in the Music category. Will they come out with hardware to match?