Report on BuyMusic
Having just heard “BuyMusic.com”:http://www.buymusic.com/ (suggested slogan: “iTunes for the rest of us”) was open for business, I decided to stop by and give it a spin. My father and brother have been raving about iTunes, so I’ve been eager to have that option myself. BuyMusic.com is supposed to be a lot more liberal than other options — like PressPlay — though not quite as liberal, of course, as Emusic.
So I surfed about for an hour and chose thirteen songs, downloaded, and burned them. The price tag: about $12.47. Here’s what it was like:
*The Good:* The selection is pretty impressive. Beyond the obvious modern-hit downloads (like Norah Jones’ “Don’t Know Why”), BuyMusic had quite a few more obscure tracks, like “Pop Goes the Weasel,” 3rd Base’s one-hit wonder dissing the MC Hammers of the world. The big names I’m familiar with — Genesis, Yes, REM, .38 Special, etc. — were pretty well represented. In fact, I plan on going back and choosing tracks for my own Def Leppard and Talking Heads compilations.
*The Bad:* There are a lot of tracks that are listed but just flat aren’t available. For example, I was keen on getting the Big Audio Dynamite’s “Rush” but couldn’t buy it. They did have an audio sample to taunt me with it, of course. Actually, there were a lot of albums missing a track here and there. And when you consider that the price of downloading an album here is almost the same as buying a used CD, one wonders why you’d bother. At least on an album level.
*The Ugly:* How can I put this? The interface is almost, but not quite, as attractive as a fetid pile of dingo kidneys. There are a lot of annoying interface features.
* Default views of genres are by individual song, but they’re sorted by album. So on one page of search results you will see about an album-and-a-half. There are ways to change the listing to album-and-artist listings, but those controls are arranged by content context rather than physical location. For example, to see a listing of albums, you have to click “More Album Matches” from the Featured Albums area of the screen rather than choosing a link or dropdown option closer to your search results.
* The buttons that put tracks in your shopping cart say “download tracks” rather than “add to basket,” making you think you’ll be buying the tracks one at a time. I searched for at least ten minutes for information on how to add something to my shopping cart before discovering that “download tracks” didn’t … actually… download.
* Digital Rights Management isn’t quite as ugly as it is at, say, PressPlay, but it still shows its ugly head here. Some tracks you’re allowed to download once, others three times. Some you can transfer to one device, some to three, some to ten, some to however many you want. Same with burning to CD.
* Most disturbing: one track I tried to download failed to download every time. Without any error message to tell me what was wrong. A trouble ticket is still pending.
* Most infuriating: Unless you have Windows XP, you’ll be using Roxio’s CDR driver to burn your audio CDs. Unless you already own it (I don’t, I prefer Nero), it’ll cost you $50 if you want to burn at more than 2x. JRiver’s Media Jukebox and others have done the same thing — it’s Roxio or nothing.
Overall, I’ll probably stick to cruising the used CD stores until online music retailers solve their DRM issues and stop letting Roxio jerk their users around, but BuyMusic.com might actually have me buying singles again. At least until iTunes implements its Windows interface.
