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Apple's iTunes Music Store, which has been open since April, proved there's money to be made in online music, even in competition with free, proliferating pirate swap services. About 6.5 million songs have been sold, but only to the Macintosh world, which represents about 3% of total computer users. Others giants, including AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon and Wal-Mart, have eyed Apple's success and promised similar services for Windows users this year. BuyMusic.com is first out of the gate. Before Apple, industry-backed music services charged monthly fees. Though the services don't release figures, analysts say they've drawn fewer than 300,000 subscribers because of fees and restrictive rules '” some songs are unplayable if you don't renew your subscription, and you pay extra to burn tunes to CD or move them to portables. BuyMusic's songs are fully portable, but there's a catch: None can be moved to Apple's iPod, which has 50% of the digital music player market, though they do work with players from Creative Labs, Rio, Lyra and others. |
Buy.com founder Scott Blum expects to sell 200 million to 300 million music downloads in the first year. Buy.com kicks off with a $ 40 million ad campaign and the introduction of the world's largest billboard in Times Square.
Source: USATODAY
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Still too expensive, although I believe prices will come down with competition.
Still too restrictive. You can't copy from one computer to another. What happens if my computer dies, I lose all my music?
All in WMA format. I don't have a player that plays WMA. Also the player has to be DRM compatible, which most aren't.
Limited number of transfers to portables. What kind of a stupid idea is this. I saw one song which only allowed 3 transfers to a portable device. If you are like most you cycle your play list on your portable often, this is crazy.
Anyway, it is a step in the right direction, but still not the service which will take off like crazy. I am sure that is coming.
Untl they free the reigns on the formats used my money stays in my pocket.
