Posted on: Sunday, August 10, 2003

BuyMusic.com opens windows to burners

By Mike Langberg
Knight Ridder News Service

BuyMusic.com, the new legal music download service, is somewhat like a ratty discount store with clueless salespeople: You can occasionally find bargains on things you want, but you wouldn't hang around just for the ambiance.

This is a stark contrast to Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store, which is clean, shiny and somewhat more expensive. But iTunes is available only to the 4 percent of home computers users in the United States who have a Macintosh, while BuyMusic.com works for the 96 percent who run Windows.

What sets iTunes apart from earlier legitimate services is Apple's very smart decision to sell music by the track or album, with no up-front requirement for a monthly subscription fee. Apple also got the recording industry to ease up on licensing restrictions; iTunes tracks can be burned to CD, for example, as many times as the user wants.

BuyMusic.com, launched July 22, is the first comprehensive pay-per-track Windows service but it lacks Apple's elegance and is saddled with tighter licensing rules.

At least it's easy to do business with BuyMusic.com ( at www.buymusic.com). To get started, you need only a non-ancient Windows PC connected to the Internet and the newest version of Microsoft's Windows Media Player (www.windowsmedia.com). If you don't have Windows Media Player 9, it's available as a free download from Microsoft (www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/download).

BuyMusic.com's home page looks suspiciously like iTunes, with rows of thumbnail-sized album covers for those releases most in demand. To find music of interest, you can search either by genre — Pop/Rock, Rap/Hip Hop, Country, Jazz, etc. — or by entering the name of an artist, song or album.

BuyMusic.com does manage to pull ahead of iTunes in pricing. Every track from iTunes sells for 99 cents, which eliminates discounts for less popular material. Songs on BuyMusic.com sell for anywhere from 79 cents to $1.49; albums range from $7.95 to $12.95.

The higher prices allow BuyMusic.com to sell some songs that the record labels wouldn't give Apple; BuyMusic.com claims to have launched with 350,000 tracks; iTunes launched with only 200,000.

BuyMusic.com isn't being totally straight with its numbers. Scott Blum, who also created the related retailing site Buy.com, admitted that about 12,000 of the 350,000 songs listed on the site aren't actually available for purchase.

Blum also said about 100,000 tracks at BuyMusic.com are selling for 79 cents each, about 150,000 at 99 cents and the remaining 60,000 at higher prices.

Both services, by the way, have agreements with all five major record groups: BMG, EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner Bros.

Both services continue without music from numerous major artists — including The Beatles and The Rolling Stones — who have refused to allow online sales of their work.

All in all, BuyMusic.com did very well on my Top 10 test. It has Billboard's list of the top 10 singles and top 10 albums for the issue dated Aug. 2 (www.billboard.com). On July 28, BuyMusic.com offered eight of the top 10 singles and seven of the top 10 albums.

To get a song from BuyMusic.com, you sign up for an account using a major card, which is billed for each transaction. If you buy three songs in one day, you're billed three times; iTunes, in comparison, makes one charge for all purchases within a 24-hour period.

Downloads took less than a minute via a high-speed home cable modem; expect much longer on a dial-up phone connection.

Songs come in the Windows Media Audio format, or WMA, at a data rate of 128 kilobits per second or slightly higher. At that data rate, a minute of music amounts about 1 megabyte of data — so most songs run 3 to 4 megabytes.

What you can do with the songs varies according to the rules imposed by each record label, which are clearly indicated before you buy. Some songs can be burned to CD only once.

But the site shows clear signs of being slapped together quickly, with lots of annoying slips and shortcomings. Blum promises major upgrades early next month.

The site doesn't present a list of portable digital music players that will accept its copy-protected WMA files. Many portable players, including Apple's iPod, won't play WMA tracks, and even some older WMA-compatible players can't be upgraded adequately.

BuyMusic.com promises free 30-second samples of every track, but doesn't always deliver.

Customer support is by e-mail — none by phone.