Gift Cards feature added

Just in time for New Year's, we now have Magnatune Gift Cards! A Gift Card is a pre-paid card that you can use at Magnatune instead of a credit card number.

As a Gift
You can give a Gift Card to a friend for them to spend as they want. You can also print out the gift card, which is credit-card sized, and give it physically to them.

To avoid separate charges to your credit card

You can buy yourself a Gift Card, so that you can group separate purchases into one charge on your credit card.

As a corporate promotion, billed-for-usage

Several companies have wanted to give away a "$20 gift certificate" at their conferences, as an incentive for people to come to the conference. We now offer this, and can either give you a list of gift card numbers, or physical, pre-printed cards that you can give away.

Instead of paying for the value of the cards given away, you are only charged for the actual usage of the cards. Since most people will never get around to using the gift card you give them, the actual cost to the company is much lower.

As a Fund-Raising Gift for a Charity

If you run a charity that has gifts for certain donation sizes, or if you auction off donated goods to raise money, talk to us. We can provide you (at no cost to you) with gift cards that will provide an incentive to people to give to your charity.

As a first-time-user co-promotion

If you want to provide your customers with some legal music. For example, if you sell an MP3 player, you could include a gift card in your packaging, so that new users of your device can get started for free.

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How this feature works:

Gift cards are created either by:

1) clicking "gift cards" on any of the "buy" pages (ie, when you click the "buy" button) and then entering your credit card number to buy a gift card of any amount

2) contacting us to make any number of gift cards for you at whatever amount you desire, either paid-ahead-of-time, or we-bill-you-for-usage. We can provide you with pre-printed labels that you can affix to your materials, an excel spreadsheet of the numbers, or pre-printed cards. If we are billing you for the actual usage, you will get an excel spreadsheet from us showing every card you were given, which were used, for how much, and exactly which albums were purchased by which people.

To use a gift card:

1) When buying a CD or Download, click the "Gift Card" link underneath the credit card field, then buy as you normally would, entering the gift card number where directed.

Additional options:

1) Gift card status: at the gift cards menu (which you reach from any "buy" page) you can find out the status of your gift card, including how much money is left on the card, as well as a log of all activity on the card.

2) Add to your gift card. Also available from the gift card menu, you can "top up" your gift card to any amount.

3) Lost your gift card? if you gave us your email address on a previous gift card purchase, you can now retrieve your gift card by providing us that email address. Your gift card numbers are then emailed to you.

Comments

[Daniel Burrows]

I think this is a great idea -- but you might want to put it in a more prominent place (front page would be ideal). It's, um, not very easy to figure out that you have to start buying an arbitrary song in order to get a gift card. I wouldn't have found the feature, except that I vaguely recalled that you had a gift card feature on the site, so I asked the all-knowing Google and ended up here.

[Nathan Jones]

Will there ever be an option to buy an album for someone? (ie. a gift certificate that can be used for a single album, not for $x.)

[John Buckman of Magnatune]

"Will there ever be an option to buy an album for someone? "

You can currently buy an album for someone, just fill in their email address and/or postal address into the purchase page.

However, I am planning a "give" button on the site, so you can give CDs/downloads to someone else, but you'll be choosing the music.

As to gift certificates for a set amount of money, I don't know yet if I'll be adding that.

-john