Tuesday, July 29, 2003
Update on Buymusic.com
It doesn't sound too good. Geek.com and USA Today suggest that Scott Blum may have compromised on quality in his rush to launch the service.
Buy.com's attempt to compete with Apple's extremely successful iTunes.com has had a slow and somewhat painful start: users who downloaded songs from the BuyMusic.com site have had issues transferring the songs to digital portable devices. The problem is caused by the fact that BuyMusic.com's files are encoded in Microsoft's Windows Media Audio format, which can be made to limit what can be done with the music file. The Internet retailer is planning on recoding its files to resolve the transfer issue, and will let users redownload the files.
Apple has sold 6.5 million songs since April; BuyMusic won't release figures, but "it's not millions," Blum says.
Buy.com's attempt to compete with Apple's extremely successful iTunes.com has had a slow and somewhat painful start: users who downloaded songs from the BuyMusic.com site have had issues transferring the songs to digital portable devices. The problem is caused by the fact that BuyMusic.com's files are encoded in Microsoft's Windows Media Audio format, which can be made to limit what can be done with the music file. The Internet retailer is planning on recoding its files to resolve the transfer issue, and will let users redownload the files.
Apple has sold 6.5 million songs since April; BuyMusic won't release figures, but "it's not millions," Blum says.
