3MusicStore Rips Off Customers

So I am a 3 UK customer, last Xmas I purchased two new Nokia N73’s on contract with what appeared to be a great deal of Unlimited* Internet Access, Unlimited* Skype Calls, Unlimited* MSN Messenger and a whole bunch of talk minutes and text messages. What was interesting was that this was the X-Series Silver package that actually was supposed to cost an extra £5 per month, on top of the usual contract fee, line rental etc.

The interesting part of that is that you also got £5 to spend per month on anything offered by 3’s online services, ie video, music etc. Well the music was great, the tracks that you could download were 99p each, perfect, I could download 5 tracks per month… all as part of my contract.

Very quietly, last month I think it was, the prices of the tracks went up to £1.29, which means that within the £5 you could only actually purchase three tracks, because four would push you over the £5. So then you don’t actually have anything that you can buy for the £1.13 left over. 3 now pockets that little bit of extra cash because the money does not carry forward to the next month. No wonder they didn’t mention anything about it. I mean sure, £1.13 is bugger all for me, and truth be told I never used all of the £5 per month anyway, just not enough new tracks coming out per month to purchase. But if you look at how many people have the same contract (I believe the other Gold contract rakes in a little more) and then multiply the £1.13 per month over an 18 month contract, they are making a reasonable amount for just simply increasing the price of the songs by 30p. It actually calculates to be an increase of 67p per track or almost double the original price.

Once again I am turned back from Digital Downloads to buying CDs and then ripping them to my phone. Higher audio quality and it is cheaper.

* Unlimited is actually the usual marketing crock of shit. There are limits on the service, but they claim that the unlimited term can be used because you are ‘not likely to go over the limit’. The unlimited internet is actually limited to 1Gb per month, Skype is limited to 5000 minutes per month and MSN Messenger is limited to 10,000 per month. I know that those limits are pretty high, and I don’t think I have ever come close to going over them, but it is definitely not ‘unlimited’.