Lonnie Knows Everything

A client contacted me to tell me that customers were complaining that they hadn’t been getting their order confirmations in e-mail and a few also complained that they hadn’t been getting the lost password e-mails either.. it was more than just one or two so they notified me and I in turn contacted SiteLink support..

The result was nearly a full week long exchange of messages back and forth, MOM support telling me to re-publish all of the data and SiteLink asking for order numbers to investigate the situation ..

The frustration came to a head when I myself noticed a pattern, all of the customers who were complaining had aol e-mail addresses.. so I asked SiteLink support to check to see if they were blocked by AOL for spamming ( AOL is quite trigger happy about spam blocking, to a fault ) .. the response I got back from SiteLink just made me upset… indeed AOL was the issue, but not because AOL blocked SiteLink… but because SiteLink blocked AOL!

Specifically .. SiteLink has excluded AOL from all e-mail messages because AOL kept tagging them as a spammer, so their reaction was foolishly to simply stop sending e-mail to AOL .. period ..  They did this and didn’t notify any one about it, so none of the SiteLink businesses know about it and the customers who place orders and never get a confirmation have no clue.. also if you are on AOL and you request your password because you legitimately lost it, it will tell you it e-mailed you.. even when it did not! .. this lead to a load of wasted time.

When I said I was bothered by this revelation, the SiteLink rep said “Well if AOL is spamming our emails, then they are excluding us actually” ..  which means to say if they are marking sitelink as spam, they are .. yadda yadda.. bad wording but the point was obvious .. my point to him in response was that.. no, in this instance they prevented the emails so they are to blame..  had AOL blocked the messages due to their nazi like spam filtering then I could say to our client that the issue was with AOL externally and that would be understood, but to now have to tell the client that their own hosting provider blocked all of AOL without notice?? not a pleasant bit of news.

They handled this foolishly and at very least should have notified their clients so hours upon hours of wasted time could be avoided.

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I began my music distribution through TuneCore back early on and I have to admit that my time with them was pretty good, the only thing I didn’t like was the fees .. as an up and comer, it didn’t make much sense for me to invest and keep paying until I built up a proper name and reputation so even though I was making money I decided to pull my music from TuneCore and then move it over to WaTunes for distribution.

My experience started out a little rough because the interface was HORRID but I did eventually work through it and things slightly improved with updated versions of their site, even though in the end it was still ugly and clunky. The CEO, Mr. Kevin Rivers .. was VERY helpful at first, spending time on the phone, replying to e-mails in a timely manner.. all seemed too good to be true.

After a few months I noticed that I’d not earned a single cent after I switched to WaTunes.. honestly I just thought nobody liked anything I was doing, but it was unusual because before I switched I was actually making money every month.. now nothing? so I decided to write Kevin and ask him about it.. he did say that he found there was an error and that they owed me some royalties! I was excited.. until I found out it was $7.00

I set out to write new material and work on some viral marketing ideas.. when I was ready to release the first single ( which has yet to be released now ) .. I contacted Kevin letting him know that I couldn’t find the option to upload my files anymore, he told me that they were no longer in the distribution business but that he could get it to iTunes if I wanted.. pissed off, I told him to immediately remove all my music from all the stores.. my business with WaTunes was now ended.

It wasn’t until I checked my site analytics and noticed a large number of searches finding my site looking for “WaTunes Scam” and “Kevin Rivers Scam” that I decided to look around myself .. obviously I’m not the only one who’s seemingly been ripped off or had a bad experience.

I’m not saying that Kevin took money from me, I’m not saying that WaTunes is a scam .. I am saying that my royalties dropped to practically nothing after switching and that apparently I’m not the only person who’s experience such oddities.

What’s your experience with WaTunes?  Do you know a better, more trustworthy way to get your music in Amazon, iTunes and other online stores?

Update: Closed for comments

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“Whyerhead” is an old friend of mine from way back, so when I read the consumerist article, I just HAD to ask ..  I first asked him if it was near his house, the conversation went like this

whyerhead: no.. north carolina..

whyerhead: me and another consumerist user tracked them down through a combination of google, google maps, and their own stupidity.

Me: like a youtube username?

whyerhead: yep!

whyerhead: a friend that had linked to her profile, googled the friend, tracked her down through myyearbook, and was able to determine landmarks from a video and google street view maps

whyerhead: dominos chief of security wasnt even able to figure it out.. but.. dominos offered us some rather nice swag for taking care of business.

SO .. if you’re ever in North Carolina … you might wanna go for Pizza Hut instead .. jk .. I’m sure that location will be on top of things, for a while at least… if you’d like to check out the original consumerist article .. go for it, it contains the videos in question!  YES I know I didn’t reveal the exact store ..  I figured that’d probably be best, but you’re armed with the tools to find that on your own ..  The “how” has been revealed..

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Today was nothing short of a bad day, no geek story here .. just general ranting

The past month or so has been filled with crap to begin with, but today decided it would put the cherry on top (god I hope it’s the top) ..

I arrive at work and get out of my car in the pouring rain and I notice the very very strong smell of gasoline, not only that, but I can see a discolored trail all the way from the street, right into the lot up to my space, so I’m thinking woah, that can’t be good .. this wasn’t a splotchy, drippy looking stream, this was a 2-3 inch thick constant stream of fuel ..

At lunch time I decided to go some place near by, right around the corner… still a stream of fuel ..  so I leave early to get this taken care of quickly.. first I stop at Firestone and have them take a look, an hour and 45 minutes later – NOTHING .. they found nothing, so $55 spent and no resolution… I drive 10 yards or so, stop .. check .. yep fuel on the ground.. so I go over to Goodyear and have them check .. half hour or so later ($84.00 for the inspection) .. they find the issue and show me, a broken seal on the side of the tank, the “filler to gas tank” seal, whatever that means.. clearly broken though … they have to order it, so that’s $22.00 .. and labor will be $168 on Friday to put it on.. keeping track? $55 + $84 + $168 = $307 so far ..

So I get home, at least glad to have probably resolved the car issue (come Friday anyway) … I decide I better file the lame R.I.T.A tax (a stupid thing here in most Ohio counties) ..  it comes to $0.00 every year so I always find it to be an insane waste of time, I don’t work in a R.I.T.A county but I live in one, so I have to file … so I’m going through it, I get to the end … I owe over a grand, on top of what I owed for Federal and everything else .. so I file it and submit a payment, forgetting I just doled out over $300 earlier today ..

Awesome … My checking account is officially empty ..

To make things worse, I’m about to inherit, I’m sure, a 20k+ debt .. 

Soooo .. I think I’ve decided to take a job in Canada and officially say fuck my life here, I’m not married, no girlfriend, no kids .. I have no ties, so I may as well just leave the country and change my name to something cool … like .. Trent

Ok so I was waiting to expand on this to really hear more word about it and it seems to be true, no MMS support for your 2g iPhone, and the reason given is that the iPhone 2g hardware does not have the capability to support it.

I can understand holding back a feature to get people to upgrade their phones, really I can .. but to flat out lie about the reason is terrible, certainly a very large number of people are aware that the iPhone can in fact do this because those with a jailbroken iphone ALREADY can do it..  I’ve been using MMS now for a long long time on my 2g phone via SwirlyMMS, the only reason I was excited about iPhone 3.0 is because I assume it will support proper rendering of the messages as well as what we just found out, it supports video properly as well ..

The reason for excluding MMS for 2g is purely a marketing move ..  some have said “What do you expect? that they just give out major updates to make the old phone do what the new one does?” … no software update will make your 2g iPhone have 3g capability, you will not get the faster speeds, you will not get the real GPS ..  those are the reasons most upgrade…

Again I say that if they simply decided to say “No, the MMS capability is a 3g feature only” without going further to claim the 2g hardware isn’t capable of supporting MMS .. I’d not be nearly as offended.

My hope is that the iphone dev team can get this functionality operating on 2g phones, it will no doubt be a hot item for many.

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