Buy Music Elsewhere
BuyMusic
I am not impressed.
Scott Blum, the web marketing wizard behind buy.com and a host of other companies, launched BuyMusic to directly compete with Apple's iTunes before the latter makes its way to the more prevalent Wintel standard later this year. At launch several weeks ago, the site boasted 300,000 tracks and prices ranging from 79 cents up for a single download.
Will people pay for legally downloadable music? Apple claims extraordinary numbers on just its small base of users, and buymusic has enough marketing clout to quickly ramp up its user base. The prices seem attractive, but there are a large number of issues the site must first contend with in order to be a user friendly experience that causes member delight and repeat purchases.
At the very least, the fledgling company must improve its user interface, song selection, conflicting and onerous warnings and download streaming. Oh, and most of the prices are nowhere near 79 cents either. They were either 25% higher (99 cents) or 44% higher ($1.14) in most cases.
The User Interface
Creating an account is easy, perhaps the most user-intuitive and friendly part of the site. There is a scary looking legal document that is popped to the screen before the account is finally completed, however, and I would be fascinated to learn how long the average user spends reading this page.
I honestly read the thing. Where else would I find this gem from the Terms of Use, "Our artists work hard..." Run that by me again? When did Billy Joel and Christopher Parkening become our artists? The gaffe is a silly one that is easily correctable, but shows the site's growing pains.
Meanwhile, BuyMusic's search functions are horrendous at best. Subscribing to the everything is clickable theme, and relying only on rudimentary breadcrumb trails, an average user soon finds they are staring at an album's production credits. Returning to the list they were scanning requires multiple clicks of the back button or starting fresh. Depending on how deep you have wandered, you just may want to start over again. Building product canyons multiple pages deep is simply poor design.
Perhaps the site's worst feature, however, is the download function. You select tracks to download by clicking them into an online shopping cart. Once you check out (and kudos to the site for at least using a standard online shopping cart metaphor), you must individually download each cut. That means that buying ten cuts, an average album's size, requires you to click and save ten different file names. There must be a way to stream all downloads together. Interestingly, the songs I selected seemed to originate from different servers with radically different download speeds. This feature alone makes the site a drag to use.
Would You Like The Beatles or The Rolling Stones?
Actually, you will not find either here. Oh, sure, there is a downloadable version of Girl bundled with a greatest hits collection, but there are no Stones, no solo McCartney, no Eagles. In fact, plenty of artists are missing from the collection. There were several cuts from an artist called Los Beatles, and the thirty second free snippet sounded like the Fab Four, but who can be sure?
BuyMusic visitors should have a clear sense of what they would like to download. Simply meandering through the site and hoping to get lucky is not the way to productively spend time. Worse, the artist connections are nowhere near as sophisticated as other sites, such as Amazon or AllMusic.
In the interest of experimenting, I ran some tests looking for a variety of artists. Few of the lesser known artists on smaller labels I favor were represented, but I can understand that their low traffic may not be cause for the resources to be allocated to save their music.
What is amazing is the differences in availability by genre. For example, there were many cuts available from Kenny Rogers, but none from Garth Brooks. Classical guitarist Christopher Parkening was adequately represented, but Liona Boyd was nowhere to be found. Searching for Queen ended up with every variant of the group's name, including Queens of the Stone Age, Queen Latifah and others, but no band fronted by Freddy Mercury. As for McCartney, I did find all of his Liverpool Oratorio available, but nothing solo by Sir Paul or any of his work with Wings or Elvis Costello. There was a copy of one of his twenty year old duets with Michael Jackson, but I managed to pass.
Even the masters are messy. Mendelssohn shows alternately as Felix Mendelssohn, F. Mendelssohn and Mendelssohn/Mozart/Bach, which probably would qualify as Western music's first supergroup.
BuyMusic allows users to search by artist, album or song and offers a variety of categories to click through. Structured as Amazon's best-selling list, they supposedly are based on site traffic. That explains how Sweet Home Alabama is the #36 single as of this writing, but does little to explain why tribute albums (even for country acts and soundtracks) are found under Pop/Rock nor why individual artists are not named on such albums, instead relying on the generic "Various Artists". Certainly researching the name of the artist is possible, but seems to be a huge waste of time.
Searching for song titles was also an exercise in futility. On a lark, I searched for Hold Ya Head, a huge hit in the Caribbean two years ago by an artist named Stevie S. The site not only failed to recognize the song title by returned the following as matches: .38 Special's Hold On Loosely, The Tubes' Talk To Ya Later and Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head. Yes, the B.J. Thomas song.
The categories also provide recommendations, but those are not tailored to your previous downloads or other relevancy rankings. Even the categorizations seem wrong. Justin Timberlake is found in the alternative section although it is unclear what he is an alternative to, perhaps the A*Teens or Hanson? Meanwhile, the oldies section combines the dissimilar works of Adam Ant and Neil Sedaka.
The featured recommendations seem slightly, perhaps three months, out of date. Of the ten "featured" new albums in Pop/Rock, I already owned five, and I have not rushed to a record store in weeks. Some of spring's hottest albums are here though, although to be fair I also tested the site against Billboard's Hot 100 chart for this week and came up with 9 of the top 10 songs in the country — an impressive hit rate.
You Didn't Think Those Songs Were 79 Cents, Did You?
Shame on you for believing the hype. Most of the tracks I found were 99 cents or $1.14 and had limited copying rights. Most common was the right to download to one to three computers, transfer up to five times and burn up to five times. The copy protection is built in, as I later found when I attempted to first play my music. Or the music I had obtained the rights to burn a certain number of times. MusicMatch found the copy protection on the .wma files and immediately sought a plug in and registered my copies so that someone can sue me if they show up in Limewire.
Download issues aside, pricing inconsistencies abound throughout the site. Some classical cuts were 79 cents, but like a cut-out bin in an old record store, I found nothing I wanted at that price. There were also major gaps such as albums that could only be downloaded as individual tracks or, even worse, were missing cuts. Can you imagine Paul Simon's masterpiece Graceland without You Can Call Me Al? You might have to if you buy music here because that cut is unavailable on the Graceland selections, available at only 99 cents each, but limited to being burned three times.
Price comparisons with Amazon and other sites continued to show BuyMusic falling far behind the competition. Train's new album could be downloaded without liners and burned on your own CD for $12.79, but you can buy the commercial CD from Amazon at $13.49. If you are worried about shipping costs, you can qualify for free shipping by also purchasing Billy Joel's complete River of Dreams, his last studio pop album for only $10.99. Sure, you can save 73 cents by downloading the streamed version, but you will be missing a cut and be limited to three transfers and five burns. Toss in Ben Folds' new Speed Graphic EP, which was unavailable for sampling on BuyMusic and was more expensive there than any site I could find, and you have the makings of a site catering to impulse buying at best.
The Bottom Line, Clicks and All
BuyMusic may have limited appeal for people who enjoy a specific song, but do not want to spend the extra cost to purchase an album, but the site is so clunky, so user-unfriendly that I would recommend that you delay joining until Apple's iTunes does Windows. If you must purchase from BuyMusic, consider limiting your purchases to artists that allow unlimited transfers rather than finding that the music you licensed is stuck on a piece of media to which you no longer have the equipment to listen.
Five Things To Remember From This Review
1. Membership is free, but the songs are as much as $1.14.
2. The Billboard Hot 100 singles are well represented.
3. Don't bother looking for The Rolling Stones, The Beatles or The Eagles
4. The site design is clunky and hard to use. Know what you want before visiting
5. The checkout process is ridiculously difficult and requires each song be separately downloaded.
