Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
who?
I'm not sure I've even heard of this site...
...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.
Well there's your problem right there. Let's see, either one million songs per day -OR- 200 to 300 in the first year. Yessir, typically fuzzy CEO math led to the downfall, I'd say. On the other hand, while that first target was quite high, the second target was easy to exceed. Why I bet I could sell 200 to 300 songs in a year by standing on the street corner.
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
Yes, this is the first casuality of the new internet bubble. Next up I think will be Napster. It will probably be bought/merged with Microsoft's forthcoming online music endeavor.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
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!
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
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.
Here's a review of BuyMusic.com. Some of the reasons for it's unpopularity are pretty obvious from the review.
1) Thing is released
2) Slashdotters deride Thing and has say it has no chance and will fail miserably
3) Thing fails miserably
Folks, let's stop and reflect. This isn't a sequence of events we see too often. And we may not see it again until-- well-- until Infinium has to either release a product or go bankrupt. So, um, may.
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."
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
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).
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"...
Is that this will likely be used as ammunition to "prove" that no one wants to buy downloadable music. "Oh alack and alas," I can hear them sigh, "We, the lowly and humble record industry did so TRY to sell music on the Internet, surely we did, but those evil pirates just refuse to buy songs they can download for free!"
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
... 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.
bit 'o quote from the above link:
I like microcars
Bad karma right there. Never fsck with a company who's CEO has a Reality Distortion Field. :-)
...most CEOs seem to have their own personally issued one. Never fsck with one that has an industrial strength generator tho.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
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).
$ echo "ceci n'est pas une pipe" | sed -Ee 's/(eci n|pas )//g'
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.
"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."
Oh, dear. How I long for the days of complete sentences.
$ echo "ceci n'est pas une pipe" | sed -Ee 's/(eci n|pas )//g'
did anyone got a close look a their logo?
Get Loaded(tm)
that's it! I'm trademarking hangovers from now on!
Seriously, who is going to buy downloaded music from Wal*Mart? Their store customer base for the most part is not sophisticated enough to get the download model and if they can't attract them, who are they going to attract? I won't buy from Wal*Mart based upon a savings of 10 cents per song when its in WMA format and I cannot be sure the track hasn't been edited.
You may not be price sensitive, but Wal-Mart's success (now at over a quarter trillion dollars a year in sales) suggests that many people do like WalMart's "Always Low Prices."
WalMart might be the only online music retailer that's making a profit - even at 88 cents/song. WalMart is the #1 retailer of CDs. They handle 14% of all music sales world wide. Thus WalMart has a huge negotiating advantage when it talks to the record lables about online sales rights -- you want your CDs on WalMart's shelves? Then license them for online sale at WalMart.com for a competative price. In contrast, Apple, Microsoft, Napster, etc. can only offer a rather meager carrot to the record labels. Thus, I'd bet that Wal-Mart pays less for its licence than do the other online music stores.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
It uses Javascript to detect the browser. (not the browser's string). Rather then get something wrong, refer to this bug:
0
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21345
--Sam
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...
Orationem pulchram non habens, scribo ista linea in lingua Latina.
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?
Evil people are out to get you.
Basically there were hoping to sell about 1 million a day with yearly sales somewhere in the 200 to 300 million range. Apple is not going to beat those goals with esimated sales at 130 million songs a year, and they are #1 right now. I would think with a smaller catalog, BuyMusic was overly optimistic. And the problems with this is that plans made are for naught if your expectations far exceed reality.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Don't count them out yet. While the "last mile" problem into trailer parks has slowed acceptance, more park operators are now providing WAP coverage for that "Wi-Fi thang".
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I thought the idea of build it and they'll come was dead a few years ago... Regardless, 500,000 plus transactions per day is not a reasonable expectation unless you are Wal-Mart.
-- $G
Well, the question is what the additional expense is of supporting that remaining 10%.
Isn't supporting practically 100% of browsers at no extra expense why we have web standards?
Here's an interesting thought (to me, anyway):
Apple's sales alone have generated $32.5 million US for the labels-- that's 65 cents per song, times their 50 million downloads. At virtually no cost to them, other than somebody to manage the checks coming in.
Think about how many people the RIAA have settled legal action with so far... at last check I saw a number of 1200. Their own numbers say they are averaging settlements of $2000 with each file sharer. That works out to $2.4 million US, LESS LEGAL COSTS, which I would imagine to be consistent.
Which market strategy is more profitable?
(I guess the counter-argument would be: keep suing a few people to keep up public education about piracy AND collect money from online music sales. But nobody's factoring in negative press and ill will generated by companies suing their own customers. And make no mistake, file sharers are, in bulk, RIAA customers.)
BuyMusic.com didn't make a key investment--dancing silhouettes! Apple has the coolness factor that other tech companies lack.
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.
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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