Say Goodbye to BuyMusic.com

dark_lotus writes "Spymac.com today is reporting that an e-mail sent to prior customers of BuyMusic.com, informing them that BuyMusic.com is being merged into the parent site, Buy.com. Spymac reports: BuyMusic.com initially expected to sell one million songs per day or 200 to 300 in the first year according to estimates by founder and CEO Scott Blum. When re-interviewed in December, Blum offered no statistics, but did say, 'We're nowhere near Apple's numbers.'"

Comments

Review of BuyMusic

[briggsb]

Here's a review of BuyMusic.com. Some of the reasons for it's unpopularity are pretty obvious from the review.

Re:Hmm...

[General Wesc]

Actually, quantity demanded is lower at higher prices. The demand itself is unchanged. Demand is the line along the quantity-price chart. Quantity Demanded is a point on the demand, determined by the price. Demand(price) = Quantity Demanded.

Silly little temrinology nitpick. Sorry

Well, not always $1.99

[gotr00t]

I think that one of the major contributing features to iTunes that stimulates Apple's success is the presence of a uniform price for all songs. BuyMusic.com did not have this, and their prices ranged from 80 cents to 2 dollars.

Moreover, their interface was terrible (browser based), and I have heard many stories about how people just could not get the songs to work on their machine (which met the system requirements).

Re:Give me a break.

[MikeXpop]

The iTMS required a mac because it required iTunes to get in (which apple fixed by porting iTunes no less). This is just a freaking website.

And to the grandparent post, just turn off javascript and you'll get in.

Re:Give me a break.

[Anonymous Coward]

So I click the pretty link for BuyMusic.com, and I'm greeted with this: "In order to take full advantage of BuyMusic.com's offerings you must be on a Windows Operating System using Internet Explorer version 5.0 or higher."

Yeah, they did that not long after they came out, because so many Mac users were checking the site out and then deriding what they found, or copying the HTML wholesale and making parody sites, which BuyMusic threatened with their lawyers.

getting into IE-only sites

[xandroid]

You could probably just tell your browser to pretend it's IE, if it'll let you (Opera and Firefox do; don't know about other ones).

Re:getting into IE-only sites

[Greg Mote]

Safari (with the Debug menu enabled) allows me to pretend I have Mozilla 1.1, Netscape 4.79, Netscape 6.2.2, Netscape 7.0, Mac MSIE 5.22, Windows MSIE 6.0, or Konqueror 3. Very hand for getting in those silly sites. It just takes a second to enable.

Re:the fate of all the other music companies

[asdf 101]

I agree. Get music for free is the mantra of the day.

But what if you could take that to the next level and get paid for sharing your purchased music. What would you rather have then?

• A system that allows you to download music for free (and maybe illegally so)?
• Or a system where you pay for music but which then allows you to get paid too for sharing it -- and which infact allows you to recoup more than the original price that you paid for the song itself.

this doesn't actually work.

[osssmkatz]

It uses Javascript to detect the browser. (not the browser's string). Rather then get something wrong, refer to this bug:

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213450

--Sam

Re:this doesn't actually work.

[stoney27]

Yea it does, I tryed with Safari and got the error message, then changed my user agent to "Windows MSIE 6.0" and hit reload. The page came up with no problems.

-S

I weep for Buymusic.com

[darkest_light]

Poor babies. Sometimes when you have terrible customer service, you sell music without the artists' permission and the press demonstration of your service fails, you have a bad product. But then again, maybe not...

allofmp3.com will eat all their lunches

[TechyImmigrant]

My music buying money and the music buying money of my friends goes to allofmp3.com.

Its cheap, legal, non DRM, supports all the formats you want including MP3, AAC, OGG at various bits rates and there are lossless compression modes as well for people who want PCM.

It has what appears to be a sufficiently complete collection of music.

You pay per megabyte. At 320kbps, albums cost around 86 cents.

So why on Earth do people choose any of the US based DRM download merchants?

Re:allofmp3.com will eat all their lunches

[meta-monkey]

I just checked out their website.

So, I'm guessing this isn't legal in the United States? When you check their legal help page, you find:

All the materials in the MediaServices projects are available for distribution through Internet according to license # LS-3?-03-79 of the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society. Under the license terms, MediaServices pays license fees for all the materials subject to the Law of the Russian Federation "On Copyright and Related Rights". All the materials are available solely for personal use and must not be used for further distribution, resale or broadcasting.

Users are held liable for the use and distribution of the MediaServices site information materials according to local legislation.

Does the Russian Federation's copyright laws allow anyone to redistribute copyrighted material using a provision something like a U.S. mechanical license combined with a compulsory license? I would imagine that means that allofmp3.com does not have an agreement with the artists or copyright holders to distribute this music. Since it says in their legal section that users are held liable according to local legislation, in the U.S. anyway there's no difference between using allofmp3.com and kazaa. I could be wrong, of course, but if you're trying to stay on the right side of the law, I don't think allofmp3.com is doing anything to help you out.

Re:Consolidation begins

[JohnsonWax]

I'd be willing to bet that the iTunes Music Store will receive anchoring from retailers such as Target though.

Already started. You can now buy iTMS Gift Cards at Target.