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Say Goodbye to BuyMusic.com

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the can't-say-i-ever-said-hello dept.

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.'"

10 of 212 comments (clear)

  1. Give me a break. by Liselle · · Score: 4, Insightful
    This may be slightly OT, but: I've never visited this site before, and I wanted to see what they were about. 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.
    I realize it's unlikely that supporting the most popular web browser on the most popular desktop OS is bad for business, but locking out everyone else? I can't even find out what these people are about without having to load up IE and crossing my fingers. Pfft, to heck with that. I won't have the gall to say "no wonder these people are going south", because I know that people who use the same browser as I do are a niche market. But still... Sheesh!
    --
    Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
    1. Re:Give me a break. by Ender+Ryan · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Hmmm... From the browser stats at my place of business, IE has fallen below 90% of the browser market, and our users are generally not very technically adept.

      In what other business is cutting off 10% of potential customers, without it being an absolute necessity of course(eg., alcohol/tobacco companies not selling to minors - bad example maybe, as they often try, heh), considered a good business decision, or even sane?

      Meh, whatever.

      --
      Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
    2. Re:Give me a break. by Fnkmaster · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Right, the point about non-IE users isn't that they are 10% of the market, it's that for many high tech apps, a substantive portion of that 10% are the early-adopters and technological evangelists. These people are often key to acceptance and adoption of these "disruptive" sorts of products. You have to appeal to Joe Average, but just appealing to Joe Average itself isn't necessarily enough.


      Not saying the way to make money is appealing to the ultra-rabid Linux geek or anything, but the broader set of technological trendsetters generally know better than to use IE.

  2. Hmm... by James+A.+M.+Joyce · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...the fact that they charge $1.99 a song probably didn't help either. It's supply and demand, people. You increase price, demand falls. It's economics 101.

    1. Re:Hmm... by e-gold · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Interestingly, www.magnatune.com reports their users DON'T pay the lowest prices they could choose (and Magnatune's what everyone SAYS they want because you can try before you buy, etc., so of course everyone's now busily-ignoring it!).
      JMR

      --
      Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
  3. the fate of all the other music companies by the_2nd_coming · · Score: 5, Insightful

    will be similar.

    the only players in the market will be Apple and Microsoft because they have the money and product variety to support the low profit business.

    --



    I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
  4. Bad Marketing by skajake · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Perhaps if i had
    a) Heard about the site
    b) They supported my browser
    I might have used it. But I suppose they will just give up and sell out before trying to reach me, the customer.

    --

    ~ Maintainer of the Skajake Projects

  5. This is surprising how? by Hawthorne01 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Confusing DRM: Songs purchased from BuyMusic vary widely in burns allowed, transeferring to other machines, etc.)

    Limited/poor selection: Never increased from their initial catalog

    Poor search functionality / confusing website layout: If customers can't find what they want, they're not going to be able to buy it.

    Good riddance to bad rubbish.

    --
    "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
  6. Say goodbye to ... ? by Zooka · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Say goodbye to BuyMusic.com, the web site.
    It's being integrated into the parent site, Buy.com.
    Not quite the same as giving up and closing shop.
    Or did I miss something?

    Is it really goodbye, or more like "See you later, when you re-open down the street"...

  7. Re:allofmp3.com will eat all their lunches by shiffman · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Legal? You mean because it's in Russia and possibly beyond the reach of American and European law? Something isn't legal just because it hasn't been caught yet.

    When something sounds too good to be true, it's likely because it is in fact too good to be true. $.86 an album may pay for bandwidth; it certainly isn't paying for the musicians. And much (most?) of the content they're offering is owned by the major labels, who are surely not receiving what they've contracted to receive.

    After a quick look around allofmp3.com I can only conclude that they're hoping to make their pile before somebody manages to shut them down. And then they can pop up somewhere else.

    The only differences between these guys and P2P are that they're better organized. And they charge you. But legal? Don't make me laugh.