BuyMusic is online with a music store for Windows.
Digging in a little one finds that the digital rights management policy is a function of record company - so your results for copying to CD-Rs, other PCs or your portable player will vary. Your portable player must be SDMI compliant.
The licensing isn't exactly clean. From their site:
Music File Licenses
When you purchase and download music from BuyMusic.com, your music files are accompanied by a license with certain restrictions. The music files are encrypted with SDMI license technology to be sure that they are used according to your license restrictions. (See Minimum System Requirements.)IMPORTANT:
Make sure you mean to buy your music from your primary computer (for example: your home computer) so that it contains your primary license. The licenses are non-transferable. Example: You cannot buy your music on your home machine and then transfer your primary license to your work machine. The computer you buy from becomes the primary computer with the primary license for that song. You can only copy music from your primary machine via your primary license. See below for details.Two Types of Licenses: Primary and Secondary
There are two types of licenses: Primary and Secondary. The primary license is downloaded to the machine you used to buy your music (for example your home computer). Your primary license enables you to copy your music from your primary computer to your digital media players and to burn it to your CDs as many times as the record label allows.If you download a secondary license, you do so onto a secondary computer (for example your work computer). Your secondary license enables you ONLY to listen to your music on your secondary computer. A secondary license does NOT allow you to copy your music from your secondary computer to your digital media players or to burn it to your CDs.
Make sure you mean to buy your music from your primary computer so that it contains your primary license. The licenses are non-transferable. You cannot buy your music on your work machine and then transfer your primary license to your home machine. The computer you buy from becomes the primary computer with the primary license for that song.
So much for buying music -- you are buying a restricted license to listening to and sometimes moving the music... It is not clear that you can have full use your music if you buy a new PC as there doesn't seem to be a mechanism to transfer the primary license. Digital rights management issues can get very sticky and I would hate to pay for this service's tech support.
Music quality is probably better than mp3 with 128kbps Windows Media Player 9 files. The site advertises $0.79 files, but I found many at $0.99 and $1.29.
As an OS X user I haven't tried it, but would be interested in hearing from people who have. This tries to be a clone of the Apple iTunes music store (down to the commercials), but there are details. To claim success relative to Apple I think these guys should show that they can do 95 million tracks in the first week (Apple did 1 million in the first 5 days with only OS X shoppers) or something that sustains around 25 million tracks a week.
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It has been quite some time since I've seen a reference to SDMI.
SDMI is a step towards "trusted" computing - while independent from Microsoft's trusted computing, they are clearly interested in hardware control. The history is littered with interesting incidents (as an exercise google SDMI and Felton) and the consortium involved the major music companies directly. Of course this sort of lockdown will become very solid when Microsoft moves most of the world to their form of secure computing. The media companies will cheer and most people will frantically upgrade their PCs to get content - at least in the imaginations of some.
Where will they allow you to go today?
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