“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,” Michael Simon reports for SpyMac.com.
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Related articles:
BuyMusic.com founder Scot Blum’s new ‘Yub.com’ features Apple iTunes Music Store – March 03, 2005
Windows iPod owner laments buying incompatible music from Buymusic.com – September 20, 2003
Does Apple have a copyright-infringement case against BuyMusic.com ads? – August 12, 2003
Another columnist piles on poor BuyMusic.com – August 05, 2003
BuyMusic.com ‘a dumber rip-off of a beautifully executed Apple idea’ – August 05, 2003
Mercury News: BuyMusic.com ‘like a ratty discount store with clueless salespeople’ – July 31, 2003
BuyMusic.com blocks Mac users – July 25, 2003
Houston Chronicle: ‘iTunes Music Store is the Rolls-Royce of online music, BuyMusic.com is a Yugo’ – July 25, 2003
BuyMusic.com not compatible with Apple iPod; founder expects to sell 1 million songs per day – July 22, 2003
BuyMusic.com launches; founder says Steve Jobs ‘a visionary, but he’s on the wrong platform’ – July 22, 2003
Sobe Beverages (an independent unit of Pepsi) and BuyMusic had announced a promotion to begin in May. I wonder if these new events will jepordize this promotion?
I find it funny their site still says “World’s Largest Download Music Store”! Are they serious?
I’ll say this for about the fiftieth time, but the Windows legal music download market is not that big.
The people I know who use Windows machines (mostly young people under 20) to collect music, mostly steal it from the internet. They laugh at the idea of paying.. I know because i’ve been trying to convert them to the ITMS.
Statements like “Don’t you feel like supporting the artists you like?” just don’t mean anything to them.
Anyway, 50% of the Pee-Sea ‘marketshare’ goes into business offices, government and educational facilities. Of the remainder, the percentage of people who are music fanatics enough to own mp3 players, and who are active legal downloaders is just not that big.
Maybe twice as big as the Macintosh market.. but not 90%. Which is the number that people throw around when they try to quantify the Pee-Sea ‘marketshare’.
And maybe the Mac music download is half of what the Pee-Sea market is, but I bet you that the Mac downloaders buy three times the amount of music.
All of this explains the ITMS numbers versus the Windows music services, which seem to be just limping along. Until these people can be talked into buying instead of just taking, not much is going to change.
dv
I hope that in the second round of music download services competitor to iTunes recognise the contribution of Mac users to this market and include us in whatever they plan. There may not be as many of us but on average we are less likely to pirate software and content than the average Windows user. Even if the iPods remain closed, the compatibility that other MP3 players have with OS X is all the reason online music services need to offer their services to us too.
I’m sure you will see the same donation to many dem’s too by Mr. Gates, he ain’t picky and the Clinton’s didn’t exactly hurt MS during the previous 8 years when he shipped, win98, me, xp all with media players, browsers, networking software and made companies pay more for a computer if it didn’t have windows on it. Remember, he basically ran Netscape and Novell out of business by giving stuff away free without one word from DC except the repub senator from Utah who was trying to save Novell and WordPerfect.
David Vessey:
I think Apple has indicated that it iTunes sells most of its songs to Windows users. In any case, sales doubled or tripled right after iTunes became compatible for Windows. So a fair number of Windows users are paying to buy music–they’re just going to Apple to do it!
Bye-Muscic.com
Mac User wrote:
“I think Apple has indicated that it iTunes sells most of its songs to Windows users. In any case, sales doubled or tripled right after iTunes became compatible for Windows”
I’ve never seen concrete numbers, and I do a fair amount of Apple watching, but I will trust that your numbers are correct.
My ‘guesstimates’ are a compilation of what I have read and anecdotal evidence. Anyway, in the end, I don’t doubt at all that the Windows download market is 2-3 times that of the Macintosh..and I did note in my post that the Windows market as probably being twice Mac market, I was just wondering about the volume of buying per computer owner.
But in the end the case I was, clumsily, trying to make was that the actual, real, music downloading Windows market does not appear to be 15-20 times
that of the Macintosh.
If you subtract the the ITMS customers from the Windows market, and subtract the number of people who frequent KaZaA, the number of customers left for the Windows only music sites are not as high as they would lead you to believe. And the sales figures bear this out.
So I do not think we have a lot to disagree about.
DV
Currently BuyMusic continues to boast being the �World�s Largest Download Music Store� in spite of having 100,000 less songs than the iTunes Music store or Napster.
Strange that the BBB would complain about Apple’s G5 ads, claiming it to be the fastest PC, but not this kind of blatantly false advertising.
DaveMac, Bill Gates is listed as only contributing to Bush. Do the search yourself. Search your neighborhood too, it’s pretty enlightening. It gives people’s names, addresses, occupations and who and how much they donated to. ($2000 is the maximum for individual contributions).
I will miss BuyMusic.com. Not because it is any good, but because of the chuckle I get when I go to their site, watch the page load in it’s entirety, then it redirects me to this:
Thank you for visiting BuyMusic.com.
In order to take full advantage of BuyMusic.com’s offerings you must be on a Windows Operating System using Internet Explorer version 5.0 or higher.
Good times.
in the LONG run…. I think one of two things MAY happen:
1. If by some chance one of these WMA stores catch on, Apple will include WMA into the iPod. After all, it should be clear that the money is NOT in selling the songs but in hardware to play them(and in MS’s case the royalties from licensing WMA), so if there are two major players in the market, iTunes and some WMA site, at that point, Apple could still make tons on the iPod by including WMA. Don’t look for this to happen ’til the market shakes down to a handful of players.
OR
2. If all the WMA sites continue to crash & burn(and I hope they do), Apple will license fairplay for cheaper non-disc based players. Drawing the line at players without HD’s will contiue to keep the iPod the king of the hill, and solve the issue of in-expensive players for folks who don’t have $250 for an iPod Mini. Apple still makes a bit of money on both the downloads as well as the license fees for non “iPod-ers”, while still maintaining the upper end of the profit margin with the iPod.
Apple needs to stay ahead of the curve and bring out a home (non portable) media player or allow third parties to build one that will work with iTMS. As with digital photo, once the market starts to move over you have to move over the entire product line eventually. iPod is nice but it does not repleace a home media player. The problem for Apple though is because the iPod is priced so high, any fixed home media player would be even more expensive! Will be interesting to see how they get round that.
“The problem for Apple though is because the iPod is priced so high, any fixed home media player would be even more expensive! Will be interesting to see how they get round that.”
Not necessarily… If you want an iPod, you pay for an iPod, if you want a home media player, you pay for that. So it can be the same price or around the same price.
I don’t want a home media player but I would buy an iPod any time. It’s not exactly the same market. If they want to make it, they can make it and sell it for same the price of the iPod or more (which is more likely)
Since the two devices wouldn’t compete with each other, you can pay around the same amount for each. At least that’s what I think
Forget home media centres. The iPod should get into the car and kick the CD stacker out.
I seem to recall Microsoft greasing both sides of the shaft…
http://www.commoncause.org/publications/sept00/092500.htm
http://www.opensecrets.org/softmoney/softcomp2.asp?txtName=Microsoft+Corp&txtUltOrg=y&txtCycle=2000&txtSort=name
Whats really interesting though is how much Apple spent in 2000, and where they spent it:
http://www.opensecrets.org/softmoney/softcomp2.asp?txtName=Apple+Computer&txtUltOrg=y&txtSort=name&txtCycle=2002
Seems the mood then changed a bit:
http://www.opensecrets.org/softmoney/softcomp2.asp?txtName=Apple+Computer&txtUltOrg=y&txtSort=name&txtCycle=2000
very interesting