BuyMusic Customer Posts Experience With Purchasing Albums

by , 9:30 AM EDT, July 30th, 2003

A post by Jennifer at Scriptygoddess is detailing the trials and tribulations of being a BuyMusic customer, or rather an ex-customer, in this case. Jennifer decided to buy two albums from BuyMusic's new service, but almost immediately had issues and problems.

First of all, according to Jennifer, BuyMusic's download system apparently requires the buyer to click on each individual song in an album in order to download them. In addition to that, the songs will not play until they have phoned home to BuyMusic to verify the license. That's understandable in itself, but Jennifer complains that she had to verify each and every song one at a time, and it just got worse from there. From Scriptygoddess:

Now that I've heard the music, I want to burn a CD (like they say you can do) so I can listen to it in my car.

Third and VERY big problem.
Since I'm using Windows200, they force you to use a windows media plugin made by Roxio. Roxio doesn't even really mention this plugin on their site except for a one year old press release. (I went there hoping they'd have an update). This plugin CRASHES consistently EVERY time I try to burn a CD. It is simply impossible to create a cd from my machine using that plugin. (Trying to use another plugin like Nero doesn't work. The license for the songs only works with that Roxio plugin).

So I figure, OK, I'm allowed a few more downloads of these songs. I'll download it to my husband's machine. He's running WindowsXP, I'm guessing since it's a new OS, the plugin is also probably newer, and maybe it will work better.

And here comes problem number four.
The "Main" license is the one I downloaded the first time to *my* machine (the windows 2000 box with the defective Roxio plugin). Subsequent downloads are "secondary licenses" from which you are not allowed to transfer to a mobile device, burn a cd, or do ANYTHING with except listen to them on that one machine.

Believe it or not, it continues to go downhill from that point. You can read the rest of the story at Scriptygoddess' Web site.

The Mac Observer Spin:

While BuyMusic's service looked bad on the surface, who could have possibly known that it could ever be this bad? It's a fairly safe assumption that the BuyMusic service was rushed to market, but judging by Jennifer's experience, it would seem as if the service may not have even been tested for basic functionality before going live.

That said, BuyMusic's terrible service may help out other music download services like the iTMS for Windows and MusicMatch's upcoming Windows service, that is if the company doesn't turn too many people off to music downloads in general.

In the meantime, at least we have parody.

Scriptygoddess