Tuesday, July 22, 2003
BuyMusic Challenges iTMS
Break out the calculators kids, your going to need them.Enter with assiduous cockiness, Buy.com’s founder Scott Blum into the download music arena. “I’m prepared to sell 1 million songs a day. I expect to do 200 million to 300 million downloads in the first year,” states Blum, after trash talking Steve Jobs and the iTunes Music Store (iTMS).
Well, I’m not a PC user, I support 1000s of them, but my home life is firmly entrenched in the MacOS, but I figured, I’d take a stroll, and see what’s got Scott so cocky. Introducing BuyMusic.com. BuyMusic is a SnapFish, iTunes, Apple Marketing rip-off. Now I don’t expect all the new players that will enter the digital music arena to be innovative. In fact, I assume that most won’t be. But its one thing to strive for the ease of use, features, and functionality of your competitor, it’s another to just steal them. And to add insult, to steal them badly. It’s like someone burglarizing your home, taking your money and valuables, then sitting down for dinner, noshing on the items in your fridge, and leaving the dirty dishes for you to clean-up.
Footnotes
I guess, I’d be a little less offended if the rip-offs were just there, and Mr. Blum’s viagra wasn’t spouting off to the Associated Press. But a dick being a dick is natural, and so with much bah-has about being the first to the market, and gaining access to the 97% PC market, Mr. Blum also introduces a service that cares less for its consumer. Obviously the goal is to get a piece of the lucritative pot of legal digital downloads, but BuyMusic is the equivalent of an RIAA fuck-you letter, no please buy.
Now, the service was just introduced so I’ll ignore HTML missteps, bugs, and the like. I could be wrong, but let us assume that there are some tired coders who will be working their behinds off to clear up the mess. So ignore the obvious glitches and got-yous, lets instead shine a light on what Mr. Blum brings to you. In the race to be the first BuyMusic didn’t pay too much attention on getting the best deals possible for their users. Digital Rights Management (DRM) is all over the place�some song can be burnt to CD, some can’t, some files can be transferred 3-5 times seem to be the most popular options, etc. 3-5 times! Let’s just focus on this, in the lifetime of your digital song, which should be somewhat equivalent to your your life span, you can transfer the item a max of 5 times. Hhhmmm. I recommend PC users purchasing LaCIEs d2 FireWire hard drives, two of 120GB ones. One can be used as a back-up copy of your music, the other as your primary storage device. This way when you upgrade your computer ever 2-5 years, you don’t effectively upgrade yourself out of your music collection.
Brushing Up On Mathematics
PC users, break out the calculator. Just randomly browsing BuyMusic, to see how their pricing and DRm differs from iTMS, I click on the new album from Train, “My Private Nation.” The album price is $12.69. The price of each single is $0.99. The song count is 11. Meaning you can buy each song independently for $10.98, but if you opt for the convenience of just purchasing the full album, you pay $1.80 more. I’m assuming that’s a convenience surcharge. Meanwhile, price on Apple’s iTMS is $10.98, thank god for Apple’s provision that the price of the album couldn’t be more than the cost of the individual songs.
Windows Media Player
The other big f@*k you, offered by BuyMusic.com to its users is its choice of musical format. Well, I wasn’t expecting MP3 (though that would have been cool), and yes, I realize their aren’t that many options. But using the Windows Media Player format just sucks. No I can’t be more elloquent than that. First this means that you can’t transfer your music to your iPod. Second it means you must use the buggy, security nightmare, Windows Media Player 9, instead of other versions of the software. Thirdly, the sound quality of .wmv compared to .mp3 or even .aac is poorer.
Other Details
Categories: Music •Technology •
Viewed: 1205
Comments: 0
Permalink: http://www.wide-eyed.org/main/article/buymusic_challenges_itms/
Comments
-
Sorry, no comments right now; but you could be the first.