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  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
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Wednesday, July 23, 2003
11:56 - But is it "Good Enough"?

(top) link
So the first declared competitor to the iTunes Music Store has been launched: the BuyMusic.com site by Buy.com. 79 cents a song! Wow! They sure undercut iTunes 99 cents, didn't they? I guess Apple is doooooooomed!

... Or not. Judging by the raucous laughter coming from all corners of the tech press today, the new service qualifies as a "Nice Try" at best.

Wired sez:

Although online retailer BuyMusic.com will offer more than 300,000 songs from the five major recording labels, users of the service will not necessarily have the freedom afforded customers of Apple's iTunes service. That service permits transfer of music to multiple computers, portable devices and compact discs.

Jobs secured uniform licensing deals from all the recording companies that allow all iTunes songs to be burned onto CD an unlimited amount of times, save for a restriction against making multiple CDs with the exact same song lists. All songs on iTunes can also be transferred to up to three different computers and to the iPod, a portable digital music player.

Songs purchased at BuyMusic can't currently be played on the iPod.

Blum was not able to obtain uniform licensing rights from the recording labels and artists. As a result, different songs on BuyMusic have different restrictions on how often they may be burned onto CDs or copied to other PCs or portable music devices. They can all be burned onto CDs at least once.

"It doesn't work on the iPod". Sounds like partisan boo-hoo'ing at first, until you realize that the iPod has become far and away the definitive, iconic MP3 player that has defined the modern market. It's multi-platform, it's easy, it's sexy, it's fast, it's full-featured. Everybody takes the iPod seriously now. Not supporting the iPod is like... like... well, like releasing a piece of software that doesn't run on Windows. (Ahem.)

It's all WMP 9's DRM, too, which is a lot more onerous than iTunes' AAC protection. The comments get a lot more fun when you start venturing into the Mac commentary world, such as this post at Geek.com:

Buymusic.com has successfully copied the entire idea of the iTunes music store. The website looks like it was designed by monkeys who were strapped to chairs and forced to stare at the awful color scheme of Windows XP. Hopefully it will flounder based on its failure to adhere to simple guidelines. Some songs can be burned a bunch of times, others can only be burned a few. This will, indeed, be hard to keep track of, but I guess Windows users are used to not being able to keep things organized.

There's a Top 10 Reasons Why BuyMusic.com Sucks list at TheMacMind, which is well worth a read. Chaosmint and Damien Barrett each give it a drive-by panning. But the best bit of all is the one at The Mac Observer, which provides not only a series of incisive observations, such as that the search function doesn't work, and this:

BM's singles downloads begin at 79¢, but we found it difficult to find any. There were some that were priced at 79¢, though there aren't as many as you might hope based on BM's marketing message. Some of Cher's songs are available at that price, which might be why somehow she has the top album in the Top 100 Pop/Rock category. The artists that are more popular, such as Justin Timberlake, Nelly, 50 Cent, Eminem, and Coldplay are priced at 99¢ for a single. This is the same price as the iTMS.

However, if the singles are the same price, why are the EPs and singles with b-sides priced so strangely? American Idol's Clay Aiken has a two-song EP for sale on both BM and the iTMS. Both retailers are selling each song individually for 99¢. The iTMS has both songs together for US$1.98, the price of the two singles added together in one simple "add album" button. It's the BM page that is confusing. Both singles are 99¢, but to buy them simultaneously will cost you $9.49. What?

...But also includes a luscious series of head-to-head comparative screenshots of the various parallel features. Commenters on the article have noticed other shortcomings, like missing thumbnail images and the fact that the reason why the search function doesn't work is because someone programmed the link to it with a backslash (\) instead of a forward slash (/). "C'mon guys! A little bit of testing!" said the commenter in question. Hear, hear.

Now, as many of the aforementioned pundits are carefully noting, it's a Good Thing for the industry, to see another store of this type emerge. Apple's going it alone meant that the labels' willingness to continue to cooperate with the idea of per-song downloads and limited DRM was contingent solely on Apple's success with the iTunes Music Store, and millions-of-downloads-a-week or no, Apple's market share is still fairly negligible compared to what they'd be getting if, say, iTunes were avilable on Windows. Now that there's another player to pander to the Windows side, the labels will be able to see some real, significant income from download sales, and before they know it they'll be entrenched in a new business model, beyond the point of no return. And that's the critical battle.

Still, though-- it's hard to mask the disappointment at seeing such a blatant ripoff of a service shamelessly stepping into the spotlight, making snarky comments like BuyMusic.com's CEO calling Steve Jobs "a visionary, but he's on the wrong platform"-- or, indeed, our schadenfreude at seeing just how badly it sucks.


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© Brian Tiemann