Great music service gets downgraded - slightly.

Some time ago, at the suggestion of my piano instructor, I began a subscription to yourmusic.com. This is a neat site where they resell brand new club edition CD's for just $6.99 apiece with free shipping. I joined because I didn't have many jazz CD's and this provides me with a slow but steady diet of new music. The service is nice because you don't have to do anything other than buy one CD every month, with no minimums, and you just keep a queue on the site and they send you the next CD from your queue on a specific day each month.

At least, that is how it is supposed to work.

All of a sudden, last month, my selection didn't show up. (It was actually a McCoy Tyner CD I need for the experiment I outlined on March 13.) Then one day, I got a funky e-mail saying they could not process my credit card. This sort of annoyed me, because the day before the e-mail, I used the card with no trouble, and I hadn't been having any issues with it, not to mention that fact that I successfully bought about $100 worth of CD's from yourmusic.com with that card over the last 5 months. I went to my account information on the website, and it said it wanted me to input my credit card security code. Unfortunately, the site had that box grayed out and I could not input the number. I sent a quick e-mail to customer service. The next day, I get a reply saying it is fixed, try it now. Same deal. I send another e-mail. This time there is a delay, but I get the "all clear" from them, and so, I try again. This time I am able to put in my security code, but, when I press the "submit" button, I still got an "unable to process" message. At that point, I figured something was wrong and they just weren't jiving with American Express, so I put in my Mastercard details and hit submit, and,

"Unable to process".

I send off some more e-mails to customer service, each getting a little pissier than the one before, and I keep getting reassurances that everything is fixed, but the site just continued to refuse my credit card. So, I went to PayPal, put money in using my Amex and placed an order with the "pay by PayPal" option.

Not ten minutes after I do that, I get an e-mail saying, we fixed the problem and are processing your order. Great, I think, now I've got two orders on the way. I fire off another e-mail to customer service telling them what happened and asking them to make sure they don't duplicate the order. A couple hours later, I check my order status, and the whole order is cancelled, even though they've got my money. One more e-mail, and I finally got them to reinstate my order. Now, I'm just waiting for the dust to settle and for my new Amex card and CD's to arrive before I try yet one more time to get things back to normal. Yesterday, Mrs. S told me that her regular monthly CD didn't ship because they were "unable to process" her credit card (which is a different number on the same Amex account as mine). Oh, well.

Truth be told, I couldn't find any other site where you can get brand new CD's for less than seven bucks, so I'm going to figure out how to get this service working again. That is to say, despite all my troubles, I still recommend this service. Everything was working fine until they goofed something up last month. I remain convinced they can fix their problems. After all, I'm offering them my business.

And if you are now thinking about signing up, drop me an e-mail so I can recommend you and I'll get a free CD when you join. That's the least yourmusic.com should do for me after all I've been through.