on buy.com music service...

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

> Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 07:55:29 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Joseph Lorenzo Hall <jhall () astron berkeley edu>
> Subject: on buy.com music service...
>
>
> For your information, Dave,
>
> This is a snipet from the current DRM Watch email update from
> GiantSteps (which has an impeccable signal-to-noise ratio). Pertinent
> quote: "[BuyMusic.com] has some user interface elements that seem to
> have been designed by the company's legal department.":
>
> [...]
>
> July 22, 2003: Scott Blum, founder of Buy.com, launched BuyMusic.com
> with over 300,000 tracks available for download individually or in
> albums. The service uses Windows Media 9 format.
>
> This is another attempt to ride the popularity of Apple's iTunes onto
> the Windows platform. BuyMusic.com (which is unaffiliated with
> Buy.com) is the first Windows-based singles-download-oriented service
> to launch, thereby beating AOL and Apple's own planned Windows launch
> by the end of 2003.
>
> Unfortunately, BuyMusic.com's design leaves a few things to be
> desired. Its developers evidently did not understand that Apple has
> attracted more users than MusicNet or Rhapsody because of its extreme
> simplicity and clean design, including the most simple-minded pricing
> scheme imaginable. Rhapsody and others allow paid downloads of single
> tracks; it's just that this feature tends to get lost among that
> site's many other usage modes, thereby putting off consumers who don't
> want to take the trouble to explore the site. BuyMusic.com veers
> considerably from iTunes' simplicity, introducing multiple price
> points, variable usage rights, and other features of more the complex
> services. It also has some user interface elements that seem to have
> been designed by the company's legal department, and its lack of an
> advanced search feature (e.g., for letting users search by both artist
> and song title) is a real impediment to ease of use.
>
> If simplicity is the winning model, AOL and Apple will have ample
> opportunity to get it right - as they have both done plenty of times
> in the past. Call BuyMusic.com an early beta of these.
>
> [...]
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> Joseph Lorenzo Hall
> Graduate Student                        http://pobox.com/~joehall
>
> "Any argument can in turn be represented as a string of symbols, and
> all reasoning by manipulation of such strings by appropriate rules."
> --Charles Sabel; Theory of a Real Time Revolution.
> http://www2.law.columbia.edu/sabel/papers.htm

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