more on buymusic.com
A few days ago I commented on the Windows online music service from Buy.com. Not having a Windows box, I wasn't able to comment on much other than what I could read on the page. As it happens I have a serious interest in this class of service, so I have asked several Windows users for their experiences and tried it over the shoulder of someone who had a new XP box.
I note that I have used and critiqued Apple's ITMS service - it is a solid first try that shows considerable clue understanding how people use music in this setting. It isn't perfect - there are many ways it could be enhanced and a few basic things are missing - but it works and its success has stimulated many others into trying (I know of a half dozen efforts at this point).
back to buymusic.com
The layout is ugly and navigation is lacking compared to ITMS. The songs download well (we tried a half dozen) although the licensing terms vary. There are real signs that this was thrown together with great haste and not everything made the deadline - there are numerous broken links and a general inconsistency to the place.
The actual act of buying is not transparent ... user agreements, entering all of your information and then going to a download page. There is no reason why a service needs to be so complicated.
Management of the music on the user's PC basically doesn't exist - you are on your own here.
We tried to burn the music to some CD-Rs. Two of the tracks burned well, but three didn't - each attempt produced a "coaster". Repeated tries to burn these three failed and each bumped the maximum number of burns category. We tried to use their tech support (email), but no replay has come in 36 hours. My guess is they are overwhelmed with questions and problems so, at this point, you are probably on your own.
The successfully burned CDs were then converted to mp3s to test transcoding between wma and mp3. Note that both codecs are lossy and source->mwa->wav->mp3 will sound worse than source->mp3 or source->wma. The test showed a noticeable degradation in quality (unfortunately I didn't have any of the standard source material used to push the codecs) ... turning up the bitrate on the mp3 step to 192kbps helped a bit, but the result was still worse than the original wma file. Both of us felt that wma->mp3(192kbps) sounded something like 96kbps mp3, but your results may vary and careful testing needs to be done. The weakest part seemed to be the addition of some artifacts on percussion. Additionally female voices sounded muddy. Transcoding is always a stupid thing to do if you worry about quality.
The service has the concept of a primary and secondary license. In theory the primary license has the ability to share music with one secondary device (say a work machine) and can write CD-Rs or transfer music to portable devices according to however the copyright owner has defined. We were unable to support multiple secondary devices. We were also unable to read files that were copied in a normal system backup (very strange). The rules suggest that you can not transfer primary licenses - if you get a new PC you (in theory) have to re-buy your music if you want primary access. I have sent mail asking for clarification on this, but haven't received a reply.
Joe (the PC owner) has three digital players. Two can handle windows media files and both claim to be SDMI compliant. We were unsuccessful in transferring music to either device and one of them crashed leaving the existing files damaged.
The quality of the music is variable. Some of it sounded fine, but one file was incomplete (buying it again indicated that the file was indeed broken) and two others sounded wrong -- like poor mp3 copies. I suspect conversions were done in batch without human monitoring (having done this sort of thing before for commercial quality).
So this strikes me as something that is unlikely to survive without major changes. The people involved probably reasoned that if they made a superficial copy of what Apple was doing, they would win due to the near-monopoly position of the PC. In rushing to service they missed numerous subtle and not to subtle points. This reminds me of the months following the success of the first iMac -- numerous PC makers repackaged PCs in colored plastic housings thinking that was the reason for the iMac's success.
There has been some initial bad press on the Net -- much of it from Mac users who offered screen by screen comparisons of buymusic and itms. Buymusic reacted by restricting access to browsers that claim to be Internet Explorer for Windows.
The worry I would have for Buy.com is that doing something this unpolished and customer unfriendly will create bad will with consumers that may transfer over to other parts of their online store.
Buy.com's CEO claimed he would be getting a million customers a day -- actually that wouldn't be a success as Apple's market share is so small. I think he needs something like five million a day to claim he has equaled what they have done. (the first cut at a number is more like 10 million, but a huge number of PCs are locked up at work at night and are unlikely platforms for the music).
Of course I may have misjudged what Windows users will tolerate - it is possible that they will be thrilled with what Mac users would consider a failing experience. Time will tell - but Joe was pretty annoyed with the service.
Thank you for the analysis. I'd be very interested in seeing what BuyMusic's response to all of these issues is, if they ever get around to responding to your email. Keep us posted!
Posted by: Benson Leung | July 27, 2003 at 23:11
Here is the response from BuyMusic:
Posted by: steve | July 28, 2003 at 07:35
Excellent review!
FYI - I got an email this morning from buymusic saying they noticed many problems transferring to portable devices and supposedly they upgraded the site... sure... I'm just glad I got my money back. If they want my business - they're going to have to be willing to give me something free for me to spend another several hours of my evening trying to figure out how to get the whole thing to work!
Posted by: Jennifer | July 28, 2003 at 09:04
Interestingly I got a reply within minutes when I bitched at them for the locking out of non-IE (until you turn off javascript of course). Could be a different department though.
Posted by: Arcterex | July 28, 2003 at 15:13
What concerns me is whether all the BuyMusic.com publicity (overwhelmingly negative though it is) is a good thing or a bad thing for consumers overall.
I mean... perhaps BuyMusic.com is gleefully thinking, "Heh heh, they may be panning us, but look at all the free publicity we're getting! Even if just 1% of the folks reading all those negative blog stories feel compelled to 'try it themselves'... it's a boon!"
I created (to my knowledge) one of the first parody logos in this blog entry...
http://blog.smilezone.com/archives/000695.htm
...but I'm starting to worry that even bad publicity may backfire on those of us wanting to warn people AWAY from BuyMusic.
Posted by: Adam Lasnik | July 29, 2003 at 02:23
I'm very curious to what all of you will think about this. I'm fortunate to have run into these guys. I'm currently Beta testing for this company. So sorry, this is the best I can tell all of you about it.
Have any of you tried using the .Ogg codec? It is a higher quality codec than mp3 that's same sized. And for all of you that can't stand the coporate execs, might interest you to know that coporate heads are making lots off of all of you that's currently using the mp3 codec. Take a look for yourselves.
http://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/amm/
.Ogg is open sourced, and it commands the respect of hackers from around the world. Doesn't mean they won't P2P music encoded on this format, but they will be less inclined to hack up anything that's finished on it.
The top five major labels are on one hand trying to protect their own best interests that they have invested millions into. On the other hand, in the same tradition, they are getting exceedingly greedier. Times are changing rapidly as is technology. But if you were making billions off of the same formula, would you be inclined to change rapidly? The faster aging record execs that don't have a clue to computing that are trying to dictate what the customers should "buy" sure aren't listening.
There's a new player around the corner. Aptly named Queue, it is free. Queue is very powerful and simple to use. The owner concepted & designed it, paid for it's development and creation for all of us. It is native .Ogg with a fair sized library (so far) that's fully encoded in .Ogg. Majority of music first off launch will be indie labels, but more will be added quickly as more of us support Ogg and purchase our music from Queue store (tentatively named the Queue Rack). There will be a one time small fee for the mp3 conversion software add-on, since Fraunhofer charges companies a fee for anyone that uses it. But good news is, there's already an awesome 20G upgradeable handheld player that supports .Ogg with built-in FM broadcast capability. How cool is that for a digital hub? Plus there's a car CD player supporting .Ogg making it's way from Japan due for release in US end of this year. Queue DRM is kept to a miminal, close, if not better than Apple's. Once you purchase the music, you own it. There's not millions of dollars for the ad campaign, so please spread the word. These guys really are a bunch of nice guys that are really trying to do things right. And I have really enjoyed working with them thus far.
Queue will be available middle of September. As my NDA expires, and hopefully be employed with them, I will post where to get it. Sorry for the long post.
Posted by: Simon | August 08, 2003 at 07:44
Perhaps I am just a jackass for even trying, but now I'm stuck with $27 of music from Buymusic.com that I cannot listen to in ANY manner. Customer service was pathetic. I would recommend that everyone stay away from this company and hope they go away quickly (and take Tommy Lee with them).
Posted by: Tony | August 25, 2003 at 05:04
".Ogg is open sourced, and it commands the respect of hackers from around the world. Doesn't mean they won't P2P music encoded on this format, but they will be less inclined to hack up anything that's finished on it."
Um... pardon me if I sound a little incredulous here, but I feel like I'm stating the obvious. If .Ogg is open-sourced, precisely *how* are you going to keep hackers from decoding it? If a format is open-sourced that means source code to decode the format is provided. All it would take would be a quick app to decode the file, save it to mp3, and ... ok ... now what? Any security the format could possibly have would be compromised if it was truly open-sourced. So is it, or isn't it?
Posted by: Steve | August 29, 2003 at 18:37
OK, let's try this from the top. MP3, Ogg, AAC are all lossey codecs. If you were to take any of these formats, decompress it, then re-compress it, your quality then is reduced. Good example would be think CD to cassette tape, then back to CD. There is nothing to "hack", there's many readily available applications for encoding and decoding. Point of using open source is, think of the majority of the "hackers" out there. Who are they? Why do they? And if you tell them more "don't", the more they "do". Idea here is make downloading simple and fast on technology that's the public's. Instead of hunting on p2p networks for a "maybe", or a real poor compressed track, or even worse: a virus tainted track. Not to mention the robbing of your favorite artist and the people that got them there. Think about it, it's not about the technology, it's about the music. Easy to take something apart, but can you make it? I mean the music.
DRM (Digital Rights Management) is the music Label's ideas. Majority of the music labels are not ran very well. They feel they need to protect their content, because p2p is making them lose their pants. Like the public, instead of educating and understanding, they simply go into denial. I have listened to the Owner of Queue talk with labels. Not only do they ask for money up front for their content that's already widely on p2p netowrks, they want a huge percentage, and they want the content to have DRM so tight, it will be just like what BuyMusic.com's "leased" content is like. Queue is really trying to make it right, once you pay for the content, you get to keep the content, just like purchasing a record, cassette, CD, DVD. This is not a competition of who can hack what or how good you can hack it. Do a little research, and you'll see how much "hacking" has already been done to ALL the legal music sites. The "hack" is to DRM, not the codec. And Queue is pushing for no DRM. But simply, Ogg sounds better, and it's free.
Posted by: Simon | September 03, 2003 at 19:07