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.

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.

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.