United Kingdom

I recieved a private message from an obvious paying member.
I've exchanged a few messages back and fourth over the past 7 days due to a bit of time lag, today I went to reply to him and got told I had to upgrade to a premium member to reply to him ???

is this correct/valid ?

I thought I could reply to messages without being a member ?

Sounds like a policy change (or a mistake) to me.
The first thing to do next time is to get an email address.

You should be able to reply if you have a message from the person in your inbox. If you cannot reply even to that? There is little point in being here frankly.

Hence why I'm asking for a support request from a bandmix contact.

Utter utter CRAP ! from bandmix.

If the person sending you the message has let his membership expire you cannot reply to him and he cannot reply to you.

So if someone sends a response two days before their membership expires, and you respond two days later, you can't respond until YOU pay to become a member.

Band mix has the most messed up model on the planet.

Man if your displeased with Bandmix, you can always hang out at craigslist with the mass murderers and child predators.
I dont mean to be rude, but why does everyone want some service or another for free?
Hint: When I make personal contact with people from Bandmix, I send them my personal E mail, and or my phone number.
Every post also includes a URL where my band can be reached.
It's really not all that difficult.

Hi,

I don't want everything for "free"

A paying user has made a request to contact me, due to a work commitment I was slow in responding to him, in the mean time his account has run out so I am no longer able to contact him

To use the example - on the last day of his accounts active time he could contact me, but because his account then expires the next day, if I take longer than one day to respond he can't get the message.

thats not asking for stuff for for free, thats asking to be able to communicate with a paid request to conclusion, and as you rightly say, swap details.

Yes, that is some what of a different situation.
Too bad ya'll did not swap contact info up front.
Live n learn eh?

well, yes it is a future learning, but in the example situation I would have not made contact so couldn't have swapped details (but I should have done with the real life example, granted).

I stopped paying for the site a while ago due to a lack of belief in it's results/system but stayed on as a free member to see what happened and to see if anyone contacted me, turns out now that someone has contacted me I can't use the site.

You kinda have a point, but at the same you don't.
You did pay for membership for a long time, so you did "give back" to the site. At the same time, you stopped paying, so it's only fair, you don't get to use the site utilities.

Always leave your e-mail on your profile. If he messaged you, he probably read your info.

I only stopped paying for the site because it sometimes took a long time for people to get back to me, or never got back to me, so to keep paying for a site to get no responses, or two then get a response to find out you have to pay more to reply wasn't a working model for me to keep paying out for (paid out for just under a year) so I stopped.

I think if you contact someone while in a paying account you should be able to communicate with that person util conclusion, your paying to make the contact, the mistake is your paying to make to use the messaging system which with hindsight is now obvious first and only contact through band mix and that's to provide contact details.