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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.'"
http://tech.velozie.com/news/546
This article was posted on Thursday
We took advantage of a voucher offer that buy.com were running here in the UK to rip them off to the tune of a few hundred pounds. A few simple security checks would have prevented it but they obviously weren't organised enough for that.
Having seen that masterpiece of commercial stupidity I'm not surprised that this venture is failing.
Free iPods - now in the UK!
Its a case of too many players (online music sites) and too few players (downloaders). I suspect the industry will converge down to 4 or 5 major online music sites. Initial survivors of the first round of consolidation will include: Apple (they've got the iPod, nice interface, and early lead), Microsoft (they've got the desktop monopoly), and Wal-Mart (they've got the low cost structure). Perhps a couple of others might surive by having a nice sales model (e.g., subscription) or novel technology (i.e., a better way to find new interesting music).
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
or did anyone else never see a single advertisement about this alternative to iTMS? I have seen hundreds of commercials and other advertisements for the iPod and iTMS but never a single one for BuyMusic. The only thing I remember hearing was on TechTV when some billboard was shown off somewhere when the site opened, that's it for my exposure to their marketing campaign.
Am I alone on this or can we equate market failure with marketting failure on this one?
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. -Martin Luther
... that this is a market rejection of their heavy-handed MS-based, Windoze-only DRM; it was way too problematic.
Plus, if you'll recall from when this service debuted, you didn't buy the music a la iTunes, but rather you in effect were leasing it.
Several people running non-mainstream websites (like my own) have reported IE falling below 60-65% since 6 months ago. My site is not targetted at anyone particular (like a Linux-site would be) - but neither is it especially mainstream.
Statistics for February:
1 62.21% MSIE (all versions)
2 14.00% Mozilla (All Gecko-based browsers)
3 9.46% Opera (all versions)
it's in my head
According to a piece on All Things Considered yesterday, the RIAA's attempts to vilify "pirates" are apparently discouraging potential customers from buying online, even from legitimate stores like iTMS and Wal-Mart.
bit 'o quote from the above link:
I like microcars
One song. I'm not a big music listener, but I wanted one particular song that I liked. I think I paid a buck for it.
The experience was OK. Yeah, all the usual incompatibilities made the process less fun than it might have been. I had to upgrade to a version of Windows Media Player that I'd been deliberately avoiding. But that's one-time pain.
So I bought my song, and listened to it a half-dozen times, and got my buck's worth. And didn't go back. Next time I needed a song, they didn't have it (it was somewhat more obscure). I went to iTunes instead and have bought another, oh, three or four songs from it.
I bring this up because I suspect that while I fall at one end of the spectrum, it shows that music services need to be prepared for the fact that many users don't buy twelve albums a year. You can advertise like crazy, but even if you do manage to acquire a customer, it's still not going to rain profits down on you. Selling popular music will remain a difficult business in which only very large players will be able to compete.
(Unpopular music, the kind many Slashdotters claim to prefer, which always seems to be the first thing people check for on a new music service, will always be something of a money-losing proposition.)
I think what these marketing geniuses are not considering is the new "internet word of mouth" factor. The books they've studied in college were probably writen when internet wasn't even around. These people are underestimating the buzz that can be generated on the internet because we are the first people to try new things and report on them in blogs, forums, etc. Has anyone seen a buzz regarding any of these DRM-laden WMA files? I've seen a plenty of excitement about iTMS, but none in relation to BuyMusic.com, Rhapsody, WalMart, Napster, et al. In fact, the noise is overwhelmingly negative when it comes to these distributors. Considering that most opinionated geeks on the internet don't use IE, should have been an indicator as to why it failed to generate the positive response from the masses. You treat them in a hostile manner, and your product or service fails to put up the kind of astronomical numbers some 40y/o suit scribbled on his business plan.
So let this be a lesson to those people who want to market their product to masses if it involves the internet - Never disregard the netizens who are the first real quality assurance team. They wouldn't let me through the gate of the store because I was using Firefox. Nevermind the fact that I'm a very dedicated Windows user who was ready to test the service out. My experience while visiting BuyMusic.com:
ME: get buymusic.com
BUYMUSIC.COM: Hello. It seems that you're behind times with your browser. I'm going to assume you're using some kind of an archaic operating system like Mac or Linux, savage. Please go buy a real computer with WindowsXP then come back! Otherwise, go away. You are not welcome here.
ME: Wait, I am a Windows user. It was awfully condescending of you to generalize.
BUYMUSIC.COM: Sir, we apologize. Please open your real browser and come check out our selection of music.
ME: Fuck you.
I had this friend in high school who back in the eighth grade bilked CDNOW to the tune of thousands of dollars. CDNOW used to have this 'affiliate program'-- similar to Amazon's, though I can't remember who developed it first-- where if you followed a link from somebody's website to CDNOW, then bought something, you'd get a referral commission, a percentage of the sale.
What my friend discovered was that this commission applied even if you didn't actually spend money-- that is, if you used a gift certificate. This lead to a nice little unintended consequence.
What my friend did was set up two accounts with different credit cards, and then buy a $20 gift certificate with one of them. And then he just over and over, for months, would go back and forth, taking that gift certificate, going on cdnow via his affiliate link, using the gift certificate to buy another $20 gift certificate, and then giving the gift certificate to his other cdnow account. Then repeating. Over. And over. And getting the referral commission each time.
By the time someone finally realized what he was doing, shut down his account, and closed the loophole, I believe he'd collected something like $3000 in referral fees just from passing this gift certificate back and forth. And since CDNOW was set up to automatically send free schwag to anyone who did well as a "referrer", and he kept triggering this, he had like 15 CDNOW t-shirts, all these posters....
He then moved on to... doing nebulous things... on ebay. By the time we graduated high school he was well-known for scalping concert tickets. I don't know what happened to him after that. I would not be surprised if he's either CEO of some huge company or in federal prison by now. Or both.
Exactly. A lot of comments here and in related articles about "this store will win!" based on its policies and (lack of) DRM ignore this important fact: it's about the product as well as the shopping experience. I went to Magnatune and spent a lot of time listening. But the only disc I bought was a Lara St. John classical. There was a fair amount of interesting music but nothing else that grabbed me enough to get my hardly earned dollars. Whereas I've been buying two albums a week at iTMS.
Magnatune has a nice model and a fine implementation. Now they just need more content I like.
Wow, you're like the RIAA posterboy aren't you? I haven't bought 40 CDs in my entire life, much less 400! I guess some people like audio stimulation. I've been listening to the same 10-15 CDs in my car for the last 8 years and don't mind the supposed lack of variety. It's enough to keep me entertained from point A to point B.
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!).
I really like Magnatunes too but for that statistic remember that Magnatunes is not only try before you buy, it's download a free MP3 before you buy. As a result this means that all payments are completely voluntary (ie they don't have to pay but do anyway) considering this it doesn't make a lot of sense that those customers would choose to pay the lowest price when they go to pay since they've already decided not to pay the real lowest price $0.
I stole this Sig
russian? yes
illegal in USA? yes
illegal in russia? no
to be fair, it's not a russian pirate site. it's a legal russian music site that happens to have an english version of their website. remember, they do license their music from russian equivalent of riaa.
I know I must be in the severe minority here, but I bought a song from buymusic.com once. Worked perfectly, and was the same price as all the others. I got it from them because none of the other stores had it. I'd say the problem was advertising.
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