“Buymusic.com opened its virtual doors this week, selling music online for ’79 cents’ (and up) per song, and $7.95 (and up) per album. Hoping to tap the huge Windows market, the service is selling digital music in the Windows Media 9 format encoded at 128kbs and wrapped with DRM. Oops, did I just say selling. Let’s check the legalese: All downloaded Content is sublicensed to End Users and not sold, notwithstanding use of the terms ‘sell,’ ‘purchase,’ ‘order,’ or ‘buy’ on the Site or this Agreement,” reports Ken “Caesar” Fisher for Ars Technica.
Fisher continues, “There’s just something humorous about Buymusic.com not really meaning ‘Buy music.’ After playing with the service this morning, I’ll say this much: the service is lacking in the one thing that I think makes iTMS great, and that’s consistency. The prices for items at Buymusic.com aren’t fixed (some songs are $0.79, while others are $0.99), and what’s worse, different songs/albums carry different use restrictions. Using DRM, publishers can put limitations on how many times you can download a file, burn it to a CD, and put it on a SDMI-compliant player. Browsing around I found that most songs/albums had unlimited burns and player transfers, with one (initial download). But if you want to buy the latest album by Audioslave, be prepared to put up with only 5 burns and 5 transfers. Some music can’t be burned or transferred to a player at all! Apparently Buymusic.com failed where Apple didn’t…”
“…the licenses are totally non-transferable, and are machine specific. The license is tied not to you, or to a key you possess. Nope, the license is tied to the computer. As far as I can tell, and someone on the phone confirmed this, once you switch computers, you’re no longer licensed. Your burned CDs are still playable, but the WMA file on your computer will no longer work,” Fisher reports.
Full article here.
I repeat my eariler comment: BuyMusic.com is garbage. They are about to flush away $40 million in advertising and they deserve to lose every penny for foisting this shoddy ripoff on the public.
The only problem….. Windows users will think that this is the greatest thing in the world because the don’t know, nor want to know, any better. Hell, I work with a bunch of them who think that Netscape and IE are the only browsers ever made! Geez but they can be so willingly ignorant!
Incompatibe with iPod, Archos, and some other brands of player, too.
Windows users won’t be fooled by this… the press (what I’ve seen so far) is not glossing over the defects. And they ARE comparing it to iTunes–fairly, if you can believe that!
What everyone wants is iTunes on Windows. Not a sneaky new way to “rent” music.
Now here is a critic who knows what’s up! i repeat bring on iTMS for Windows. Though I hate to say that you are a sad majority, I hate it even more that you are being taken advantage of in this way. Fret no more, the remedy is around the corner.
This just goes to show the world how right Steve Jobs got it on the first try. I don;t see BuyMusic.com faking out a lot of people, even if they are dull enough to have chosen Windows.
I just want to say that I love this site, MacDailyNews! Does anybody agree with me?
I Agree!
This is the best Mac News SITE…
The only thing that gets burned from BuyMusic.con (spelling intentional) is the supposed customer.
The claim of 300,000 songs seems totally bogus, many of the ones listed can not be downloaded. There MAY be 300,000 songs you can sample, but I wonder how many are truly downloadable. I wonder if the number is actually less than Apple’s over 250,000+ songs. Anyone have a lot of time to count?
And I love that the CLAIM of actually…legaly being able to BUY the songs is false and misleading.
Amazing brazen, high profile, false advertising and plagerism! This should be fun to watch.
… the press (what I’ve seen so far) is not glossing over the defects. And they ARE comparing it to iTunes–fairly, if you can believe that!
I aggree that there is a more-than-usual fair comparison in the press.
But it is far from uniform. The following is taken from write-ups I read on Slashdot and MacSurfer:
CNN/Money gives the impression that BuyMusic.com and iTunes Music Store are parity products, save for the supported OS.
C|Net News lambasts the BuyMusic.com site for only supporting IE [for Windows]. They reiterate the call for site designers to support standards-compliant browers. They don’t actually mention much about the BuyMusic site or service. I guess they gave up when they couldn’t view the site with Mozilla.
Reuters discusses BuyMusic.com entry into the crowded Wintel pay music download market. Although they mention iTunes recent success, no mention is made of the restrictions placed upon BuyMusic.com tunes, or the reasons for iTunes success. It is not apparent that the Reuters reporter even visited the BuyMusic.com site.
The LA Times actually gives an excellent description of the failings of the BuyMusic.com site, distribution model, pricing and licensing issues.
Associated Press also mentions the BuyMusic.com important drawbacks, although it miscalculates the number if tunes currently available on iTunes Music Store.
I won’t comment on the [not exactly objective] mac-specific news sites.
Regarding the ability to view/use the BorrowMusic.com site in IE 5+ only, even though my Firebird (Mozilla) browser gets the “IE only” message, my Safari browser has no problem viewing the site. Of course, as I stated before, I have no use for this site, and I did not attempt a download, so I don’t know if there is some other poorly written code on the site that would impact a Safari user’s ability to download the music.
I wrote up a summary of my thoughts on this, and posted it on the web here:
http://www.baseballjunkie.net/ben/archives/000356.html#000356
There’s one issue that I think is missing here: limited transfers to music players is a crippling licensing term for a lot of music.
Ben
It’s worse than is being reported!!
You cannot even transfer songs to the Creative Labs portable devices that they feature in their ads and in their online store.
I know – I own one and I purchased 4 songs from Buymusic last night. When I transfered them to my Nomad Jukebox Zen, I get an error message saying the songs won’t play because I don’t have a valid license.
In a thread on Creative Labs’ own newsgroup – news.creativelabs.com – a representative from Creative admits that Buymusic screwed up their DRM implementation.
Not good!