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Apple Archive

The Many Failings of BuyMusic.com

- 2003.07.25

The new BuyMusic.com site is essentially a copy of Apple's iTunes Music Store - except that it only works on PCs. (If you're browsing the Web on a Mac or not using Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher, you'll get a nice error message when you visit the BuyMusic.com website.)

When I first heard about it, I was excited that PC users could finally get paid music downloads by the song, especially at only 79¢ per song. Then I actually went to the site to see what it was like.

First of all, you have to use Windows Media Player to listen to the files. Not only do I find Windows Media player confusing, I also don't like the way Microsoft can find out what files you're playing with its software. I'd rather use something like WinAmp to listen to music - but BuyMusic.com says that "it may not work." This, of course, means that if you have a preference in MP3 players, you may as well forget it; if you want to use BuyMusic.com, you must use what they tell you to. The files are also not MP3s; they're the proprietary WMA format.

Then I noticed how BuyMusic.com uses SDMI encryption. This means that it only works with certain portable MP3 players - and the iPod isn't one of them. It also means that you can't move your tunes onto a different computer or play them in a different player (unless you buy a secondary license, which allows you to only play your songs on the other computer and not burn them to CD). And you can burn songs to only a certain number of CDs.

And if you buy a Mac to replace your PC.... Well, all those songs that you bought and paid for - they'll be useless.

As far as the selection goes, there seems to be quite a bit. Not everything that I could ever hope for, and I was unable to find any classical music, which disappointed me somewhat.

And so much for the 79¢ songs; most of the songs I were interested in cost 99¢, the same price Apple charges for songs with much less restrictive license management.

Isn't all this part of the reason why all of the other music downloading services failed? I mean, with pages to read about what you can and can't do with your music, any sane person would just go to KaZaa and download an MP3 file with which they won't have to worry about what it will and won't be compatible with. Too many restrictions get people confused, and they'll figure it's not worth the trouble.

Since I use a PC as well as a Mac, I could theoretically try it out, but I don't think I want to invest my money into something so restricted and copy protected - especially something I can't copy over to my Mac in order to load it onto my iPod.

While I'm not a big fan of the selection that Apple has to offer (although it should improve soon, with the indie labels signing on), its system is much better. Download a song. You paid for it; it's yours. You can burn it to CD however many times you want, you can copy it to your MP3 player, and if it's not compatible, you can always burn the files to CD and then encode them as MP3s so they can be copied to your MP3 player.

Apple doesn't put the same kind of complicated restrictions that makes sites like BuyMusic.com less desirable. I do think (and I'm clearly not alone) that once Apple's iTunes Music Store gets itself over to the Windows platform, it will prove to be much more successful than sites like BuyMusic.com.

But BuyMusic.com does provide Apple with competition, and it provides Apple with a reason to get iTunes ported to Windows quickly.

The good thing for Apple is that BuyMusic.com isn't subscription based, so users aren't tied to it for a fixed period of time if they decide they don't like it or find that they prefer Apple's system of providing music.

Recent Apple Archive articles

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More in the Apple Archive index.

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