BuyMusic

» see buymusic.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

In the summer of 2003 i was a university student in Turkey on dial-up, with broadband still three years away and no mechanism for paying an American website for anything. BuyMusic wanted a credit card and a Windows machine running Internet Explorer, and it was licensed for the United States only. Paid music downloads were not a category that existed where i was sitting, and BuyMusic never made the smallest attempt to be a store anyone outside the US could use.

Scott Blum, who had founded Buy.com, launched BuyMusic on July 22 2003 with an event in Times Square and the claim that it was the world's largest music download store. It opened with roughly three hundred thousand tracks. Songs started at 79 cents and albums at $7.95, but the pricing was variable rather than flat, so the same track could cost more depending on what the label had negotiated. Everything came as Windows Media Audio wrapped in Microsoft's digital rights management.

The premise was sound. Apple had opened the iTunes Music Store in April 2003 and it ran on Macintosh only, which left the overwhelming majority of the desktop market with no legal download store at all. BuyMusic was the first product to go after that gap, and for three months it was the only one.

What BuyMusic actually shipped did not help its case. The site required Internet Explorer 5.0 or later and broke in anything else, sometimes including machines that met the stated requirements. The usage rights varied per track in ways the store did not surface until after purchase, so one song might permit five CD burns and the next might permit none. The July 2003 reviews were brutal and the product never recovered from them.

~ the record ~

~ ninety days ~

iTunes for Windows arrived on October 16 2003. It carried a flat 99 cent price and it worked with the iPod, which was already the device people were buying. BuyMusic's single advantage had been that it ran on Windows. That advantage lasted from July 22 to October 16, a little under three months, and nothing else in the store's design gave it a second reason to be there.

~ the sales pitch ~

BuyMusic spent heavily on advertising and aimed nearly all of it at Apple. The campaign copied the visual language of the iTunes ads and then mocked it, including a spot with Tommy Lee smashing the Gibson guitar that Apple's print ads had been built around. Blum was open about the strategy in interviews. The store was positioned as the version of iTunes that ran on the computer most people actually owned.

The trouble with borrowing your competitor's advertising is that it teaches your customers to think about your competitor. Three months later the competitor showed up on Windows with a better product, and the audience already knew the name.

~ the quiet part ~

There was never a shutdown announcement. Buy.com stopped referring to BuyMusic in its press materials around 2007 and the store had disappeared entirely by December 2009. Buy.com itself was sold to Rakuten in 2010, rebranded as Rakuten.com and later wound down. Anyone who had bought tracks was left holding DRM-locked Windows Media files, which was the standard exit for that whole generation of stores.

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