Well, seeing that I have already started this, I thought I'd just follow the history of the still young BuyMusic.com. It looks like they have officially announced their first glitch. It seems that a good amount of customers have reported problems transferring their music to their portable players. BuyMusic.com has responded with this:

“We are unable to provide technical assistance after you have downloaded the music … to your primary computer. In addition, we are unable to credit you back for failed or damaged copies once you have successfully downloaded the music.”

Now THAT'S customer service.

Jody Whitesides has been quoted on plenty of sites the last couple of days reporting her problems with BuyMusic.com. The artist's basic complaint is that she found not just one of her albums on the online service, but all of them. She only found it annoying because no one ever contacted her about it.

“I did a search for one of my old CD's that will be going onto iTunes and It turns out my CD was there on BuyMusic.com. As were the CD's of several other bands that I'm friends with. All of whom were not contacted about being placed for sale there.

Here's what I've deduced… BuyMusic.com (which I will refer to as BM) got their “vast” music library of 300,000 plus songs from a company called the Orchard. The Orchard is a distribution company that has consistently shafted artists by not paying them for CD's sold nor returning unsold CD's or cancelling contracts. So, without the express consent of what is likely lots of the Orchards catalog, BM has put it up for sale at the bargain price of $.79 a song.”

This is all self explanatory, so I'm not going to get into it. I'm just glad to see that the artists are finally getting something out of the RIAA's efforts.

BuyMusic.com declined to disclose it's first week's figures this week. but “it's not millions,” CEO Scott Blum says. Of course CEO Scott Blum also said they would sell 1 million songs per day and “expect to do 200 million to 300 million downloads in the first year.” Sounds like the IT department of the store is going to be a BIT over budget. The Apple iTunes Music Store sold 1 million songs in its first week.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 30th, 2003 at 12:04 pm and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.