7digital Downloads

[James Gillock]

7digitalGroup PLC is a British publicly listed company that offers access to music, tracking and reporting for clients. London-based, 7digital provides end-to-end music services for the fitness, social media, DSPs, and gaming industries with brands such as Barry's and Triller.[2][3] Advertising Age described 7digital (Zdigital in Australia) in 2008 as a British download store,[4] while the New York Times referred to them as a digital music company.[5][6]7digital's Smooth Operations, Unique Production and Above the Title companies are now branded 7digital Creative, and produce content for BBC Radio 1, Radio 1Xtra, BBC Radio 2 and BBC Radio 3.[citation needed]In 2009 HMV bought 50% of 7digital.[7] In 2019, the company replaced their second CEO,[1] Simon Cole,[8] who had replaced founder/CEO Ben Drury.[5] In February 2023, it was announced 7digital had been acquired by the Santa Monica-headquartered B2B music licensing company, Songtradr.[9]

Initially their API was used by Guvera, Onkyo, Samsung, BlackBerry, HMV, musical.ly (now TikTok) and Technics. They subsequently partnered with Triller, FORME Life, Soundtrack Your Brand, Global Eagle, Grandpad, Apex Rides, and Fender.

7digital was founded in 2004 by Ben Drury and James Kane[10] as a B2B digital music services company, building music download stores for record labels, brands and other retailers. 7digital Direct to Consumer (D2C) service was launched in 2005.

7digital is backed by technology venture capital firm Balderton Capital (formerly Benchmark Capital Europe).On 28 January 2008, 7digital raised 4.25m in its series B investor round, securing investment from various groups including Sutton Place Managers. The investment was to be used to launch 7digital.com in more European countries and the United States,[11] along with expanding the sites offerings to include downloadable video and computer games.[12]

In October 2012, 7digital secured $10 million in funding from two new investors,[17] Dolby and Imagination Technologies.[18] HMV's stake was previously reduced to less than 20%,[19] and following HMV entering into administration, retail restructuring specialists Hilco, are now the holders of these shares.

Spotify users from the UK, France, Norway, Finland, Spain, The Netherlands and Sweden were able to purchase tracks to download (if available) from 7digital.[48] This was done by right-clicking and selecting the 'Buy From' link. However, Spotify launched their own purchase service during 2011 which replaced 7digital.[49]

7digital's Indiestore launched in early 2006 and allowed unsigned artists and independent labels create their own digital music download store for free.[56] The Indiestore was discontinued in 2010.[57] 7digital directs independent artists to work with independent aggregators, where they will be able to service their music to a variety of music retailers.[58]

As of July 2015, 7digital operated in 82 countries.[60] On May 19, 2017, 7digital announced the sudden closure of its EU store,[61] though it continued to have stores for some individual European nations. As of 2023, the service is still available in 20 countries.

I hope you all are well and safe today. Just yesterday I started receiving an error message on my digital download when using Chrome stating it was dangerous and blocked. It had been working fine for months up until then. I have deleted and re uploaded the file many different times in many different ways Changing the tile, combing the zip file into one pdf, etc.). It's a pdf zip file. I'm sure you can imagine how negatively that would impact our business if customers paid for and couldn't open the file. Thankfully we caught the error and have just removed the file until the issue is fixed. I appreciate your help in this matter. Squarespace has only stated it's an issue on my end, but it happens on multiple computers from different people and only on Chrome. If it is an issue on our end, why did it suddenly just start? At any rate, I don't care who is at fault, I'd just like a solution if anyone has one. I've tired renaming the file using underscore as seen in a June 2022 -please-help-zip-files-purchased-from-our-store-are-unreadable/ post thread, but without success. Thank you all so much!!

Same issue here - got multiple customers today saying that zip file downloads are being flagged as dangerous and they can't download them! What a nightmare! Is this something Squarespace has done? Literally started happening today, been fine for years.

I would say this is a client side issue. If this is all happening on Chrome recently. I suggest a recent update to Chrome with a more cautious stance on Zip files. Zip files are a large vector for viruses, malware, and etc.

People willy nilly download zip files, extract the contents and execute the code inside, having no idea what they are doing and just because someone on the internet told them to. It is a big problem. You can't blame the web browser for being more obvious about potentially dangerous files.

Find my contributions useful? Please like, upvote, mark my answer as the best ( solution ), and see my profile. Thanks for your support! I am a Squarespace ( and other technological things ) consultant open for new projects.

Now that you (royal) mention this behaviour. I seem to recall Chrome did rejigger their download behaviour in the browser recently. That new download inbox icon on the toolbar as opposed to the previous UI. There were also some changes to the security settings also.

I appreciate you responding, but there is no way we can run a business like that! If ran a sandwich shop and every time someone bought a sandwich the packaging locked and told the customer they might get food poisoning, I don't think me having to educate them that it's really fine and to just bypass the warning is going to get me good business or a good reputation, and I'll have to deal with that on almost every sale since chrome is by far the most popular web browser. I'm having customers genuinely say WTF? and assuming we're some shady, unsafe website. It's only a matter of time before we start getting customer reviews mentioning this!

Given that squarespace only let's us sell a single digital file, we have no choice but to compress multiple files into an archive, and zip is by far most accessible & popular archive format. If they allowed us to upload multiple files (with an total sum filesize limit) then this would resolve the problem as we wouldn't need to use zip files at all (this is what Etsy does, for example) - this would be by far the best solution, already we have some customers don't know what a zip file is either and this causes customer support issues by itself.

I don't know if other archival formats (.rar etc) will trigger similar warnings, but those are far less well known and less widely supported without having the end user download addition software to un-archive them, which isn't really acceptable for a business either.

The best solution I can come up with for this is to edit the download notification email that customers receive when purchasing a digital file and adding a "Google Chrome Users - Please Read" section that notes that this warning can appear when using chrome, telling them how to bypass it, and trying to re-assure them that our downloads are safe, and that this warning does not mean that any kind of virus or threat has actually been detected.

Not everyone will read these notes but hopefully some customers will catch them and it will reduce customer support calls to some extent. This would be far less of a problem if chrome's messaging around what is basically an "are you sure?" warning didn't sound so apocalyptic.

Wow, it's good to know it's not just me, but sad to know that we are all experiencing this issue. I agree that having a download flagged as dangerous isn't good for business as @sussexseamstress0603 stated and that we shouldn't have to do that. I also agree that Squarespace should let us upload more than one file per download. While I appreciate @creedon input, we can't blame customer behavior (although mindful downloading should be a thing). I've shared this issue with Squarespace and hope they will take our plight seriously...although history doesn't support that happening, I can still hope!! As for the instruction/warning @sussexseamstress0603 mentioned, I'd added that message to the download page, but even I thought if I saw that on a website, I'd think twice about purchasing. It just sound shady.

Thanks so much for sharing that response from Squarespace @DCDR. While I understand their suggestion of using PDF instead - that isn't an option if you need to sell multiple files (as we do). Also, it's a very temporary measure, as since the original post I've learned that the roadmap for files that Chrome will be blocking in this way in scheduled to include PDF's in the next update. Eventually it's even going to include formats like PNG! So it's just a matter of time before almost all file downloads are blocked by default, making life much more difficult for legitimate sellers of digital products.

While I understand the need for protecting users, the current messaging around this from Google is the equivalent of "don't cross the road - you might die!". Everything in life has risks, and I feel the messaging & behaviour at the moment is way too fear mongering, rather than encouraging users to make an informed choice.

I had a colleague report today that they couldn't download a .zip file from the Squarespace site we are working on, but they could download a .zip file from Canva. Both with Google Chrome. So maybe there is something to the idea that there is an issue that Squarespace can make better.

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