Buy.Com Debuts Music Download Site

elucidus writes "Buy.com on Tuesday launched a new digital music download service -- the site, BuyMusic.com, offers a catalog of more than 300,000 songs. The site only loads in Internet Explorer and all the files are Windows Media 9 formatted with DRM. No word yet on whether the public announcement of a supposed gaping hole in Windows Media DRM caused any concern before the launch. Compatible players include the Nomad IIc 9 and Creative's Jukebox Zen."

Comments

Re:Linux no access

[Sean80]

Well, it's a free country after all, and they have every right to target a particular customer base.

At the end of the day, the Linux customer base is much, much smaller than that of Windows, and a company is free to pursue their largest, most profitable market segment.

Good

[Dark Paladin]

I say "good". No, I probably won't use it - I can't play the WMV files, and I own an iPod anyway. Yes, I use the Apple iTunes store - and I've spent more money there than I have in years on music (though, if I had to do it over again, I wouldn't have gotten the Steve Martin CD for my long drive).

But this is good because of competition. I expect it will do fairly well - people will check it out and buy some stuff, some won't check "between the lines" about the CD burning and such. Will it do as well as the iTunes store? Maybe - maybe not.

But if starts making money at all, it's competition. Apple will be spurred to work faster to get iTunes for Windows out, and to work harder with other MP3 companies to include AAC codecs. Which will spur Buy to change it's licensing (or its negotiations with companies holding the music licenses), and maybe later on, all music will be burnable to your own CD. (I'm not sure how many handhelds you can put it on - my assumption is "infinite", but I haven't seen the small print - I don't run Internet Explorer). Which will perhaps prompt Apple to cut prices, maybe rise the computer amount you can license your songs on from 3 to 5.

And round and round the competition game goes.

CDBaby is about to become a front end for independent musicians (where's spell check when I need it) who want to get onto iTunes - $40 to start, then CDBaby takes 9% of the profit, the musicians get the rest.

Which, if that takes off in any way, may change some of the dynamics of the music business. Oh, hardly a lot - most people still get their music in the stores so big music companies doing the promotion/advertising/distributing will hold most of the cards, but if it changes by as much as 10%, that's huge - and could lead to better contracts for musicians. Which might make the music companies compete for more fair, balanced contracts.

And around and around goes the wheel of competition.

It's all about competition. I love that word. "Compete". Makes things better through a struggle. "Compete fairly" are better words, of course, which is why there are governments about to smack things down when they get to monopoly status, because at that point, competition is lost.

And who knows? In a year, we could have tons of online music. People will discover what contracts work and what don't, and things may change for the better.

Or - I could be wrong. But I hope not.