Please stop sucking.
See, I don't have any interest in iTunes, or AAC, or any form of lossy, DRM protected bullshit; I have an iPod, but I run Rockbox on it, and on my computer I play mostly FLACs with fb2k; previous experience has shown this will doubtless change over the course of my lifetime, and I'd rather not have my music tied to any particular hardware or software, or indeed, codec. This goes doubly so if I'm giving you money for it.
So, a few of you have seen the light, and let me buy FLAC; MagnaTune are the obvious poster boy, who even let me pick how much I like to pay, but there's also sites like BoomKat, Beep and 7digital.
Magnatune: Auto-play audio on album pages makes browsing using tabs annoying. No means to buy multiple albums in one transaction. Likes selling multi-CD albums as several single CD ones. Shopping baskets make larger purchases easier; you like money don't you?
BoomKat: Catalog consists almost entirely of glitchy-Commodore-64-in-a-microwave nonsense. If I didn't already know I liked Higher Intelligence Agency I'd have no chance of finding out through them, since their related items system is rubbish. Overpriced; just cos FLAC is CD-quality doesn't mean I want to pay CD prices; bandwidth doesn't cost that much.
Beep: Where do I fucking begin? The average 12 year old's MySpace page is more usable than Beep. Want to find what they have in FLAC? Yup, you can list them; have fun hovering over the 4mm wide album cover thumbnails for several seconds waiting for the title="" on each one to appear. Also, hope you didn't expect any track listings or previews; hey, you know Boards of Canada rock, what do you need a sample for?
7digital: £9.99 for a FLAC of In Rainbows. That's *more* than the price of the CD new, what the fucking fuck? And for this, you have to download each track individually even using their nasty little download tool. Oh, and they'll come down at around 300kbps; evidently that high price isn't going towards endless immortal bandwidth, because I could blow off all my limbs and crawl down the shops on bloody stumps to buy it faster than 7digital can let me download it. Do they offer anything else in FLAC? No idea, they don't let you search on that. And while embedded album art is nice, it's generally only a good idea if you're doing FLAC-as-CD-image and targeting the 5% of the market who uses the very latest foobar2000 and will actually notice them. If only there was some sort of… archive format, which could "Zip" up multiple files into one big one.
Even ignoring my admittedly rare desire for lossless, there's so much these sites could be doing to encourage me to spend more; let me queue up interesting sounding tracks/albums to listen to while I browse; learn what I might like and make suggestions; give me my own RSS feed (aka PodCast) based on my preferences so I'm not forced to use your pathetic web based player; buy some fucking bandwidth; hire a HCI guy to fix your crappy site usability…
If you want to beat piracy, you don't do it by putting DRM in everything trying to make water not wet as the industry is clearly starting to notice; no, you do it by actually offering a better service than a bunch of random unpaid geeks can provide.