'Improvements' (streaming player and archive) and subscriber value

I am very disappointed by the recent changes to Gramophone and its online services, which had the potential to bring improvements but mostly seem like backwards steps (at least for subscribers). Whilst I am grateful for the responses of the editoral team in this forum, and their general sympathetic tone and hints of positive developments in the future, it is particularly disappointing that they have identified many of the developments I consider as negative as unintended design flaws rather than simply a strategy I disagree with. If only they had consulted fully with subscribers and performed a small-scale beta, these could all have been avoided.

I very much value(d) the cover CD, and I do not see the online streaming content (as currently implemented) as an improvement at all. In contrast, I would have very much welcomed a download service or iPhone-compatible podcast, ideally in parallel with the CD. The comments from the editoral team unfortunately miss the point entirely. It is straightforward for me to connect my laptop to my hi-fi and select a playlist on a streaming service, and the bit-rate is more than acceptable; but I do not find this more convenient or desirable.  The online service provides more minutes of music, but if I wanted to find a source of these tracks online I could have done so anyway.  I enjoyed listening to the CD, and found the short pre-compiled selection ideal; I know that realistically I am unlikely to attach my laptop and stream the new longer extracts each month.  The idea that this is an enhancement for subscribers, and that the previous price is still justified, seems nonsensical to me. I have been deprived of something previously available only to subscribers, which I valued, in exchange for something available to everyone (subscriber or not), which I value less: instead of funding my cover CD, my subscription now funds an online resource for non-subscribers.

The cover CD is the one aspect of the recent changes I remember being consulted about, in a Reader Survey. There was a question about what I would do if the cover CD was removed, including the option of cancelling my subscription. Was there really a large majority in favour of scrapping the CD without changing the price?

The online player is in many ways a good service, but it is implemented in Flash (no iPod/iPhone support) and without download options. I have read the comments sympathetically acknowledging that iPod support would be nice and noting that it may be considered for future revisions, but claiming that adding it now would have damaged the user experience for other users or delayed implementation. A delay would have been no problem from a reader's perspective (I hadn't requested the change in the first place); but designing it in Flash was straightforwardly a choice, and not a particularly forward-looking one in my opinion (with growing trends towards HTML 5 and portable devices, etc.), and there is no automatic reason for an alternative implementation to provide a poorer experience. Obviously different rights (at a different cost) would need to have been negotiated for a download service than a streaming one, but this would have been an easy way to continue to provide a differentiated service for subscribers.

The online archive should be a fantastic resource, and I very much appreciate the great effort involved in digitising all the back issues. However, the lack of indexing and cross-referencing makes browsing a chore, and the lack of metadata (combined with OCR errors) means that searching for reviews is much inferior to the old Gramofile service. Clearly manually fixing this is extremely time-consuming and perhaps impractical, but if it had been addressed at the design stage (for example, integrating the archive with metadata in the Gramofile database and parsing the most obvious cross-linking features like the contents page and text like  'review on page n') it would not have been necessary. I'm sure that conducting a beta for a few scanned issues, with a detailed questionnaire, would have identified these failings: or even the straightforward logical approach of starting with your existing feature set as a minimum requirement. There was also the option of fixing the security issues you mentioned in Gramofile: it cannot have been too complex or costly to simply migrate the data to a new database with a simple web interface. (I speak as someone with experience of setting up databases with a web interface). Removing PDFs, and the original Gramofile service, means that there is no way for users to work around these issues. The copyright issues were hardly unforeseeable, nor are they difficult to resolve - surely they could be mitigated against simply by restricting content to subscribers and/or watermarking images.

It is probably too much to hope that the CD will be reinstated,
downloads offered or the price reduced - I enjoy reading the magazine,
of course, so I do not really wish to cancel my subscription, and if
others feel the same presumably you will see no reason to give up your cost savings.

It is also too late to do anything about the fundamental design of your online services now that the new ones have been launched and the superior old ones scrapped: but I hope you will at least consider consulting your readers in more detail - and taking more care at the design stage to identify the most important features - before making any more major changes in the future. Please do also give some consideration to what benefits you are providing to subscribers (and also one-off purchasers) over casual web-browsers. After this latest erosion, these benefits amount to access to the written content a few months' ahead of archive viewers in a browsable form (i.e. print). If improvements to the archive (very much welcome!) and access to the text immediately after publication in other electronic formats (potentially also welcome) are under consideration, please ensure that subscribers benefit from this, and at the very least are not asked to pay twice (if they prefer both print and electronic formats) or to pay for content available free of charge elsewhere (essentially funding a public service).