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.'"
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
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.
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
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"...
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.
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.