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BuyMusic.com
beats Apple to PC buyers
July 22nd, 2003
PC owners got a
new Internet music download site Tuesday that offers songs for as little
as 79 cents without any monthly fee, but which carries many of the restrictions
that have stymied rival services.
Although online retailer BuyMusic.com will offer more than 300,000 songs
from the five major recording labels, users of the service will not
necessarily have the freedom afforded customers of Apple's iTunes service.
That service permits transfer of music to multiple computers, portable
devices and compact discs.
BuyMusic hopes to score the sort of attention that helped drive sales
for Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store since its launch April 28.
BuyMusic founder Scott Blum called Apple CEO Steve Jobs "a visionary, but he's on the wrong platform." While Apple users constitute about 3 percent of the personal computer market, BuyMusic is targeting the 97 percent of people with PCs.
Apple has promised a PC version of iTunes for later this year but would not be more specific when reached for comment on Monday.
BuyMusic, which is based in Aliso Viejo, Calif., will vie for a share of a market with such online music subscription services as pressplay, Rhapsody, MusicNow and MusicNet, which have not managed to cull substantial customer traffic from the free file-sharing networks.
The subscription services require users to pay monthly fees for access, while BuyMusic follows the iTunes buy-as-you-go model.
The service has about 100,000 more songs than iTunes but is comparable to pressplay,
which was acquired
by Roxio and is expected to undergo a relaunch later this year under the
Napster brand.
BuyMusic is charging
between 79 cents and $1.29 for individual song downloads. The charge for
downloading a full album starts at $7.95 and can go as high as about $12.
The iTunes' service charges $9.99 for most full albums.
BuyMusic downloads are in Microsoft's Windows Media format.
Still, BuyMusic suffers from some of the same licensing drawbacks that
the other PC-based digital music retailers have. "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."
Jobs secured uniform licensing deals from all the recording companies
that allow all iTunes songs to be burned onto CD an unlimited amount of
times, save for a restriction for making multiple CDs with the exact song
lists. All songs on iTunes can also be transferred to up to three different
computers and to the iPod, a portable digital music player.
Songs "purchased" at BuyMusic can't currently be played on the
iPod.
Blum was not able to obtain uniform licensing rights from the recording
labels and artists. As a result, different songs on BuyMusic have different
restrictions for how often they may be burned onto CDs or copied to other
PCs or portable music devices. They can all be burned onto CDs at least
once.
By year's end, BuyMusic and the other PC-based digital music retailers
are expected to face a competing PC version of iTunes, which has had more
than 6.5 million songs downloaded to date.
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