Bods tries to use myCokeMusic.com

Published on 26 January 2004 in , , , , , ,

I’ve read a lot about myCokeMusic.com – yet another bandwagon jumping music download site (how many of them do we need?!) – so I thought I’d try it out. And this being my blog, I’d better tell you how it went.

  1. Open up MozillaFirebird and point it to www.mycokemusic.com.
  2. Put on sunglasses when bright red page appears. Follow the instructions and "click to enter".
  3. Small popup opens (grrr). Horrible loud music starts playing, crappy animation starts animating. Yep it’s a splash screen… What is this? 1999 again?
  4. Rush for ‘Skip Intro’ button.
  5. Popup closes.
  6. Stare at screen in bemusement.
  7. Repeat steps 1 to 4.
  8. Popup closes.
  9. Stare at screen in bemusement.
  10. Repeat steps 1 to 4.
  11. Popup closes.
  12. Decide that the problem could be with MozillaFirebird’s popup blocking which I have – like any sensible person – set to only open windows which I have requested be opened. Whilst I’m requesting to ‘skip intro’, the browser is presuming I haven’t requested the window – probably because the Flash movie has requested it be opened.
  13. Realise that the popup window has no status bar so I can’t disable the popup-blocking for that page.
  14. Decide to go back to www.mycokemusic.com and try to open the popup link into a full size window. Right click on the link, and select ‘Open Link in New Tab’.
  15. Curse the person who made the link a JavaScript command.
  16. View source code and pour over the HTML and JavaScript trying to find the link.
  17. Finally find the URL. Insert it into browser and try to open page.
  18. Evil noisy splash screen takes up the full window. Disable popup blocking for the page.
  19. Click ‘Skip Intro’ link. New browser window opens (what the one I originally went to not good enough???)
  20. Am presented with a completely blank screen.
  21. View source code. Realise the whole website is made up entirely of JavaScript which is obviously either broken, or disabled in MozillaFirebird.
  22. Shut down browser and reach for my collection of CDs.

Of course any normal person would have given up a long time ago, but what on earth are myCokeMusic.com playing at? Splash screens?

And making the site have popups flying all over the place? When everyone from AOL to Google, and soon Microsoft are trying to get us to instal popup blocking? Are these people nuts?

Elsewhere I read that the site doesn’t yet work on Macs who are statistically more likely to download than Windows users!

Maybe if they’d spent their time making the site work properly instead of poncing around on annoying, flashing, noisy splash screens that do nothing but waste bandwidth, they wouldn’t have so much bad press.

And when you couple that with opening popups everywhere… well what planet are they on? Maybe the designers tried to talk them out of it and the management insisted on splash screens and plenty of new windows. Well we’ll never know, but to my eyes, myCokeMusic.com just looks like a stack of other websites that came and failed miserably. Now if only myCokeMusic.com had learnt from those spectacular mistakes…

Incidentally I had no intention of buying anything anyway. I prefer a better quality to my audio thank you very much.

Update: Well it took me four months to pluck up the courage to go further, but further I did. Yep Bods ‘uses’ mycokemusic.com carries on the saga…