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.
