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."
...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
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"...
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
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.
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.