The articles keep rocking and rolling in regarding BuyMusic.com and none of them are pretty. Here’s the latest from The Denver Post:
“Now that it is up and running, the verdicts on BuyMusic are broadbanding in, and results are mixed. The company gets credit for trying to shore up the cratering legal pop music trade with a massive song library and an easy-pay system. But like the Windows operating system itself years ago, BuyMusic.com arrives as a dumber rip-off of a beautifully executed Apple idea, frustrating users with its ugly graphics, disjointed presentation and clunky download-and-burn process,” writes Michael Booth for The Denver Post.
“Even the BuyMusic TV commercials are poor copies of Apple’s multi-ethnic solo singers enjoying their newly purchased songs against a pure white background. In another incomprehensible move, BuyMusic tapped as its public face the rock has-been Tommy Lee, who is more famous for a few minutes of non-face time on an explicit video than for any few minutes of brilliant song,” Booth writes.
Booth continues, “At first glance, Apple’s service looks like a fun and intuitive jukebox. BuyMusic looks like a bad version of Amazon, somehow crammed with both too much information and too little at the same time. And yes, one critic hit the mark with the comment that the graphics were designed by ‘monkeys strapped to chairs and forced to stare at the awful color scheme of Windows XP.'”
“Most confusing and frustrating is the legalese attached to burn rights: Apple says you can have 10 burns of each song, and an unlimited number more if you just mix the playlist a little. BuyMusic’s rights range from only three burns of each song, by Matchbox Twenty, for example, to five for Audioslave, to 10 for Kelly Clarkson and an unlimited total for Ashanti. Try to keep track of all that in your busy life,” Booth writes.
Full article here.
Could it be that at long last the Great Unwashed Masses are now able to discern crap from quality? Are they waking up to the fact that their Window computers are poor substitues for the real thing, the Macintosh?
I wonder why no one hasn’t yet commented on the part of BuyMusic.com ‘s Useage statement that they reserve the right to use your personal data and sell it to third parties, making BuyMusic.com not only a crappy copy of iTMS, but a spam-scam as well.
where can i meet the monkeys id like to shake their hands
Windows ‘a dumber rip-off of a beautifully executed Apple idea’
Yes!! gzero, you’ve got it exactly right. I don’t understand why more people are not hugely upset over this.
They must be desperate for profit at all costs including the consumer. I wonder how much cushion they have if for some reason they are not able to make profits from the music sales. Most big corporate businesses usually have approximately a 2-5 year cushion. By that time they must make a profit if not, they shut it down. But this is a dot com business so, the rules are different. Only time will tell.
Still haven’t seen any sales figures…
MacDailyNews reported, “Apple has sold 6.5 million songs since April; BuyMusic won’t release figures, but ‘it’s not millions,’ [Buy.com’s CEO Scott] Blum says.”
Glitch hits BuyMusic.com; some songs unplayable on digital portables
gzero wrote “I wonder why no one hasn’t yet commented on the part of BuyMusic.com ‘s Useage statement that they reserve the right to use your personal data and sell it to third parties, making BuyMusic.com not only a crappy copy of iTMS, but a spam-scam as well.”
Because by selling the personal info they gather, that’s the ONLY way they’ll make any money
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Thanks, Jack for the reference (I did see that when it was broadcast) but my point completely is that Blum said it’s “not millions” – well, duh. He was SO gung-ho and arrogant at the startup and got lots of media to fawn over him and made wild predictions about the instant success and so on, but that was the first day. How about now? I wanna know – what ARE the sales figures? How MANY songs/albums have they “sold”? I’m not interesting in knowing what the sales figures are NOT – which is pretty obvious at this point, since they’re being so tight-lipped about it. I think they’re embarrassed to admit how things are really going – and will likely make some lame excuse about what’s been NOT happening so far to mitigate the poor performance and high frustration and lack of uniform “licensing”, not to mention the privary policy and on and on…
hi. buymusic.com is really bad. i downloaded 3 songs the other day and one of them wont even play. the music will play until 1:14 and all I hear is a sizzle noise and then dead silence until the track is over at 3:58. wtf is that?! i called their tech support and they told me theyre having tech issues at the moment and then all of the sudden the dumb girl hung up on me. i’m buying an emac in two months and i look forward to itunes4
hooo hooo arghhha-rgh-hh cheeecheeee- che
translation
“those XP colors sure are pretty, thankyou human blum for ‘nana”
Hey por,
I just realized that in your case here, BuyMusic is just making a lot more people switch to Macs, who have been already lured by iPods. Oh, boy, how can this entertainment strategy be any better? colored-screen iPods? online music videos & movies store?