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To absolutely no one's surprise, a music downloading company is
taking a run at the iTunes Music Store. When you're top dog (or the
only dog), people come knocking. Needless to say, yesterday's
announcement by BuyMusic.com to bring music downloading to the
Windows masses sparked an interesting round of articles.
There's good, bad, and stupid in the BuyMusic.com foray into the
music downloading business.
The Bad
BuyMusic.com beats Apple to the Windows downloading punch. While
Apple is surely moving as fast as possible to port iTunes to Windows,
they clearly weren't fast enough. Personally, I'm not entirely
convinced that the first mover will always win out in the end. Apple
anyone?
BuyMusic.com rides Apple's coat tails. While imitation is the
sincerest form of flattery, compete emulation isn't exactly a good
thing. Buy is coming as close a possible to the Apple ads as they can
to and muddying the waters. On the up side, the confusion could work
in Apple's favor when they roll out their own Windows music
service.
The Good
Competition is a good thing. BuyMusic.com has emerged to at least
move Apple's feet closer to the fire. I'm fairly certain that
BuyMusic.com won't be Apple's main problem. There are other services
that probably have more potential than BuyMusic.com.
BuyMusic.com attracts new users to paid music downloads. This is a
good thing, because BuyMusic.com will be the company that pours out
the money to get the new Windows users. Each new Windows user is a
potential Apple Music Store customer once iTunes for Windows is
ready. When Apple rolls out the iTunes Music Store for Windows, these
folks will likely follow the better user experience.
The Stupid
Bravado is a requirement when you're taking on the big boys, and
Scott Blum seems to have that in spades. Hidden away in the
chest-thumping rhetoric are these stupid things about
BuyMusic.com.
It's not compatible with the iPod. It seems a bit amusing that
Scott accuses Jobs of being on the wrong platform when he is rolling
out a service that doesn't work with 50% of the portable music
players on the market. That would be the iPod.
Varying restrictions on downloaded songs. I'm not certain how
selling a similar commodity with different restrictions is going to
help the consumer. Place your bets, people. How many BuyMusic.com
users will be fed up with figuring out what tunes they can copy and
play where by the end of the first year?
Cost is the only thing that matters. From the sound of things,
cost seems to be where Scott wants everyone focusing their attention.
However, what Scott doesn't realize is that the user experience
counts for a great deal. Price is nice, but if I have to figure out
which songs have which copying restrictions and work with which
players, well, I'll willingly pay an extra 20¢ a song. (And not
all BuyMusic.com songs are 79¢.)
Once BuyMusic.com users find out that things aren't as easy as
they seem, they'll look elsewhere. Like the Apple Music Store.
Stephen Van
Esch is the founder and president of
the
E-learning Foundry, an online training
resource for Mac users. Steve loves the Mac and is doubly bilingual,
since he's also fluent in Windows and French.
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