Sunday, March 28, 2004
BuyMusic.com Death Kneel
Launched before iTunes for Windows, BuyMusic.com initially expected to sell one million songs per day, or 200 to 300 million 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." -- Michael Simon, Bye, Bye, BuyMusic.According to an e-mail sent to prior customers of BuyMusic.com, the online store will become “integrated” with its parent site, Buy.com, within several days. What this means to the fate of what was once called “The World’s Largest Download Music Store” is unclear.
Launched before iTunes for Windows, BuyMusic.com initially expected to sell one million songs per day, or 200 to 300 million 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.”—Michael Simon, Bye, Bye, BuyMusic
MacDailyNews, and SlashDot, are reporting that the first of many Windows Media Format based music stores out the door, is the first off the market as well. BuyMusic.com who with full bluster and misguided attempt to corner the Windows market of potential music buyers, sent email to prior customers indicating the BuyMusic.com will become a part of it’s parent site Buy.com.
Obviously, I wasn’t a fan of BuyMusic.com when it came out, and Scott Blum, founder and CEO, who also acted as a spoke person for it, didn’t help it any. What was wrong with BuyMusic.com is too volumous for me to go through completely. So I will hit only what I consider the major points.
Overlooking the Consumer
First, in the rush to be the first to the Windows market, Scott Blum and BuyMusic overlooked the consumer. While Apple had painstakenly negotiated with the major music players to get the same rights per song/per album. Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, goal was to insure that the user had rights, and those rights were as close to general rights of purchase on physical CDs as possible. So while DRM was introduced, Apple’s FairPlay was based far more on consumer rights than music industry rights.
Scott and BuyMusic pretty much through the baby out with the bath water, they wanted to be in bed with the record labels so much that consumer rights really didn’t come into play. So what the consumer got was an ungodly mess of restrictions/rights that varied from song to song, massive fluctuation in song pricing, and more. Many of those earlier users of BuyMusic were burnt so badly on the minefield of restrictions that they never returned.
Building a Web Site
BuyMusic.com second big mistake, according to me, was building a website instead of a software application. Again, lets compare to Apple, since they were the pioneer in this field.
Apple built a web-based application that was accessible via a software application. Apple had introduced iTunes, a music management application a few years prior, after purchasing out iTunes major competition, SoundJam, Apple pretty much had the best music ‘jukebox’/management software for the Mac OS. Apple then created a web-based application, the iTunes Music Store (iTMS), and integrated it into iTunes. You can’t get to the store via the web, but you can download the software and run it from your computer. The store uses web standards like XML, and is driven by Apple’s own WebObjects.
Apple’s goal was to build a seamless experience for the user. So it’s midnight, your working, listening to one of the many radio stations in iTunes, or prehaps even listening to songs from your own music collection. All of a sudden your overwhelmed by the need to hear Mandy Moore’s ”Crush”, not because you like Mandy, but because you have some annoying, addicting refrain scouring through your head like cleansing bubbles, washing away your normal music intelligence, and replacing it with pop.
With iTunes, you just click on the iTMS store icon in the music player, type Mandy Moore’s name, one-click and your satisfied. Now you can listen to ’Crush‘ in its full musical glory, then hide it in your music library so you friends, family, and life-partner don’t see it.
All urges are not the same, and this is where BuyMusic adopted a major failing. It assumed both that impulse buys could be shuttled into brand loyality and that a web site was just as good as an application. They were wrong on both accounts. It would be greatif Apple did a survey on the ratio of impusle buys versus planned purchases it as iTunes Music Store, but baring that, I’ll extrapolate from my own habits (they aren’t average, but good enough).
Impulse buys rule! The saying is, ”a fool and his money will soon part”, but the question is can you come up with a way to part the fool from his money before common sense kicks in. Here’s where impulse shopping can make or break. So your late night excursion to Mandy Moore land (I apologize to Mandy, I actually like her, and think she’s one of the more worthy artist to come out of that pop moment which introduced us to Jessica, Britney, Christina, and who were the others??) is a temporary bout of insanity.
iTMS takes advantage out the starting gate. iTunes is already open on your computer, and even if its not, it launches just as quickly as a web browser. A rapid search brings up 56 Mandy Moore songs, and you can see that ‘Crush’ is one of the top purchases, so others must have fallen prey just as you. You click the ‘buy now’ and in about 30 seconds you on a high speed internet connection you have your song. Your now listening to Mandy, and overwhelmes with the brilliance of her vocals, you accidently buy, ”I Want to Be With You,” and ”Have a Little Faith In Me”. Shhhhh. No one has to know.
The same goal can take 2-10 minutes with BuyMusic.com. First you have to launch your web browser, than switch to an artist search, 54 songs return, ‘Crush’ is the last one on the first page, then you need to look at the music rights (they’re not that bad for this song (3 computers, 5 transfers, and 5 burns), then you can download. Unfortunately downloading hasn’t been perfected, its not seemless, and often not even fun. By the time you get to this stage, its too late, reason has reassociated itself to your brain. Your mind scoffs, “You were going to buy Mandy Moore?” and you replay, “Of course not, I just wanted to be reminded why I hate pop. Hate pop I say, yes.” Dead impulse, and you still have your dollar.
Yes, and there’s still the brand loyality issue. Why would you shop at BuyMusic.com over WalMart Music, or MyCokeMusic.com? Do they instill so much trust that your brain immediately thinks, BuyMusic.com, or are you going to spend a few moments debating which store you should go to, who will most likely have it, will it be easy to find, etc., etc.
Market Size Doesn’t Translate to Sales
And finally, what I consider the last kick in shin for BuyMusic.com. Scott Blum went around spouting off on how Apple’s software was only compatible with a miniscule segment of the computer supported population. Not un-true, despite if you argue 1% vs 5% install-base. But his theory was that if Apple could sell over 250,000 songs a week to a ‘small’ market share, well than BuyMusic could sell over 1 million a week, to the much larger Windows population.
This is a common mistake in marketing new products and services in technology. No offense, but Windows-based PC users are cheap. If they can spend $500 on a computer and have someone tell them that its just as good as this $2000 computer over to the right, they are happy. They are firmly entrenched in the idea that a computer should be an appliance. No don’t get me wrong, its not as if I’m against that goal, I just believe its a ways away. Plus, I believe if you make all technology about speed and cost (how fast it can go for how cheap), then you loose the opportunity to make computing more of a commodity. When your profit margins are raiser thin, you don’t devote a lot of time into research and development; and if your not devoting time to research and development, then occasionally a brilliant idea will come about, but all the progress made by slowly plodding through science is lost.
So we have a large-base of PC users, who aren’t even willing to spend a $1000 bucks on a good PC, who’s PCs are totally alien to them, because crashes, pop-up ads, viruses, and spam have taken court. These are not people looking to spend money online for music. If they can wrestle control of Internet Explorer from ad-ware and spyware they may be willing to give your site a visit, but for now, their browser doesn’t work with a diluge of porn and security ads immediately assaulting them. So Kazaa is good, Orpheus is grand. The songs are free, except for time, and the software actually works, while Internet Explorer hangs on launch.
While entry level Macs are quite competitive with comparable PCs, Mac users to a large degree are willing to spend more money to easily accomplish what it is they want to do, whether that be digital photos, word processing, or digital music. The pop-up ads are suppressed (unless you really want them), the viruses are minimal, and it was way too much of a hassle to try to find software that would work with Kazaa or Orpheus on your Mac anyway. Easy-to-use, quick to find, you already have a music budget, and the software is already on your desktop, translates into rapid sales.
Corning this market of music lovers who are willing to spend money, allows you to spend time cultivating those not use to spending money into making impulse buys. Eventually impulse buys will translate into small music allowances, and wow, sales just keep growing.
So bye, bye, BuyMusic. Long live iTunes.
Footnotes
“Say Goodbye to BuyMusic.com,” Slashdot.org, http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/28/1452215
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