Back in the old days, when music was imprisoned on CDs, you might be able to pick up a few extra bucks by hauling your discs to the local music store and trying to sell back the albums that you didn’t listen to anymore. It was kind of like a low-stakes pawn shop: they didn’t offer much, and you were vaguely embarrassed by all of the utter crap that the counter guy didn’t want either.
As CD stores have disappeared and digital music has taken hold, this little ritual has gone by the wayside for most people. But plenty of us still have stacks of physical CDs that we might want to sell, or at least get converted to digital files without having to sit around for hours of mind-numbing drudge work.
That’s where Madison, WI-based tech startup Murfie comes into the picture. The company, which is an alum of TechStars Boston and has raised at least $3.1 million in private financing, will ship your CD collection to its headquarters, rip all of the dics to digital files stored on its servers, and keep the physical discs on hand, allowing you to offer them for sale or trade to other people. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a Dave Matthews fan.
I tried the service out recently, and found some good features along with some frustrations. I think Murfie could be most useful for people who have a ton of CDs that need to be (finally) converted to digital versions. At smaller volumes, it makes less sense solely as a CD-ripping service, and that was definitely the category I fell into.
But there are already enough used albums that fit my taste in Murfie’s collection of more than 400,000 discs to make the marketplace feature attractive, no matter how many CDs you want to upload—even before sending in my discs, I bought a copy of “Lord Willin’” by Clipse, and the quality was perfect.
Overall, you have to realize that Murfie is a very small, pretty new company, which means it’s still ironing out some kinks. And, like all startup services, there’s the possibility that the company could disappear, get acquired and shut down, or radically change its service—call it an early adopter’s tax.
There are plenty of other companies that offer streaming music services these days, including some of the biggest names in consumer technology. Apple’s iTunes Match, which I already pay for, charges $25 per year to give you on-the-go streaming access to all of your music, even on mobile devices. That’s the main way I listen to music now.
Pandora lets you listen to music in a radio-like playlist, while Spotify offers on-demand access to streaming music—both of these have free and paid tiers of service.
Since it seems like digital and streaming music is an irreversible trend—with some high-end users still opting for the richer quality of vinyl—I have to wonder what Murfie hopes to do in the long run. Eventually, you’d think, we will just run out of people who still need their CDs converted to digital versions. But perhaps that’s still a ways out.
I signed up for Murfie in early December, and the process was pretty standard for online services. One thing that upset me right out of the gate, however, was the company’s insistence on getting me locked into an annual membership. Startups often have a tendency to push the envelope on this kind of behavior, since they’re typically in a day-to-day fight just to keep existing. But this desperation is not cool when it starts forcing you into decisions you’re not ready to make. I’d rather try out the service for a year and decide whether I want to renew.
Murfie’s basic offer is that it will rip all of your CDs to digital versions, accessible to listen, download, sell, or trade online, for $1 per disc. In reality, it’s a bit more tricky. When I went to sign up, I only wanted to send in 10 albums, but the minimum order was 25.
OK, I figured, that’s fair—this company is doing some labor for me and paying for the shipping, too, so I rifled through my old stacks and found 15 more discs. But once I signed up for the Murfie service, I found the problem with this minimum purchase.
Since $25 is the price for one year of the company’s “Gold” subscription service—which also gives you a $1 discount on purchases and fee-free trades—you’re automatically signed up to the annual plan. And it auto-renews after the first year is over. And there’s no way to turn off the auto-renew on the Murfie website.
This is not a good online marketing practice, to say the least. I emailed Murfie support to ask whether I could opt out of the recurring subscription, and the service representative confirmed that “right now we can opt out of auto-renew for you here via support, so you’ll have to contact us whenever you want that done instead of doing it yourself.”
(If you don’t subscribe to one of the annual services, Murfie charges $12 per year to store up to 1,000 CDs—a pretty cheap price. And they actually do store them, since you can have the discs shipped back. The other way to avoid a yearly storage fee is to perform 12 transactions of some kind on the CD store.)
The problem with Murfie’s annual subscription program didn’t end there. Several weeks after contacting the representative, I checked back into my profile on the website, and found that it was still listing me as an auto-renewing member. I sent another support e-mail and got ahold of someone on the site’s chat function, and they promised to get the problem ironed out.
One big novelty with Murfie’s service is the shipping process. Since it’s focused on physical CDs, they’ve got to get from your house to company headquarters in Wisconsin somehow. The startup has tackled this by sending a nifty little shipping kit, which consists of an unassembled cardboard box that is folded flat and wrapped with brown paper. You put the box together, fasten it in place with the enclosed strips of tape, and crumple up the paper wrapping to use as packing material.
To send the package back to Murfie, you have to take the assembled box to a UPS retail store (or find a driver and hand it over). The shipping is pre-paid, but be warned: the box I got wouldn’t fit into the standard UPS drop-box that sits in my office building’s mailroom, which meant I had to tote the package around with me on the subway until I got to a physical UPS store.
By this point, with all the walking around from my home to the office and back to the store, I’d probably expended three times the effort that I would have by simply sliding the 25 discs into my laptop on a random weekend. But, again, this was just for 25 CDs. If I had a really big collection, it’d still be a time-saver, and the used-music online store still beckoned—to me, that was the real promise.
