So Rush is coming out with their first album in 5 years, and their 18th studio album so far. I've idolized Rush since I was a kid. I want to preorder tickets to their show and a copy of their fancy DVD-album, so I can be entered in the contest to meet the band. But the service they are using to sell their preorders, Musictoday, offers me the what may be the worst experience I've ever had on the web. Most of the time, an awful interface just means that it's a pain to get through, or that I need to tell OmniWeb to pretend to be some other browser, or sometimes that I even have to employ Firefox in order to get it to work. But this mess didn't even let me get through the order. Check this out:
- I follow the trail of links from Rush's site through three or four separate windows to get to the ticket preordering page.
- Of course, the tickets are expensive, and the company selling them wants an extra $10 on top of each one; where does this money go? Not to expert web developers and usability geniuses.
- For tickets, I have two options: Price Level 1 and Price level 2. There is no indication what kind of seats I might get from each level. There is no link to the venue's seating map. There is no information beyond the two prices.
- I choose Level 2. The seats are pretty far back. I go back and try Level 1, to see how much better the seats are, but then I'm told that those tickets aren't available. Why in the world am I offered a choice in the first place if I can't actually choose it?
- I go back and try to buy Level 2 tickets again, but this time I get an entirely unhelpful error, "can't change seats!"
- After starting over from the very beginning, I manage to convince it that I want to buy a pair of Level 2 tickets. The billing info form includes an unlabeled checkbox right in the middle of all of my other info. What could it mean? "Spam me every day"? "If I leave this box unchecked I forfeit my tickets"? "This address is an igloo"? I don't know. I left it unchecked, and I hope that was okay.
- I got through the ticket buying process, then reached the part where they offer a preorder of the CD, the fancy DVD-album, and the T-shirt. Each item has a pop-up menu with a single choice listing the price. Maybe for some items you can choose your own price? I don't know. It's silly. Anyway, each item also has a big wide text field for entering the quantity of the item you want. As if you might order 10,000,000 copies of the CD and 999,999,999 T-shirts. So I type "1" into the field for the DVD-album and hit Continue. Error: "To purchase additional products, at least one item must have a quantity greater than 0." I tried re-entering my "1", I tried changing the values of all of the fields to various numbers. Nothing worked. It simply wouldn't let me order the album.
- Maybe it hates WebKit. Fine. I start up Firefox and copy over the URL from OmniWeb. Instead of getting taken anywhere useful, I get a message telling me to go back to the front of the store I was trying to use. Not a link there for me to click, just an error message telling me to figure it out myself. Fine. I remove the end of the URL and try to go back to rush.musictoday.com/Rush. It sends me to a totally different domain, ticketstoday.com, where the word "Rush" doesn't even appear.
- I navigate through their site to try to get back to the Rush store. I get there, and it claims that there is no Rush merchandise available at all.
- I figure, okay, maybe I have to log in using the account info I got from them before, and then I can see the members-only preorder stuff. I go back and check the e-mail they sent me when I signed up for their service, the one where I clicked the confirmation link and everything. I try to log in with that address, and it claims that no such member exists.
All right, let's create an account. I go through the whole process and enter all of my personal information, including my home address and phone number. It goes to the USPS database to confirm that my address is real. Imagine my frustration when I got this:
Going back to the official Rush site and trying to step through it all again yields no clear way to just get order the album; it only appears to offer you that page after you successfully buy tickets, and I wasn't going to buy any more tickets. >:O
It's a real shame that Rush would partner up with someone who treats fans so awfully. Every other aspect of being a fan and interacting with the band, from the music itself, to the CD packaging, to the tour books, to the shows, to Neil's essays about each album, are world-class, legendary, all-around good experiences. Why does this one part have to fail so badly?
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