Mercury News: BuyMusic Not Perfect But Has Bargains

by , 4:00 PM EDT, July 31st, 2003

The San Jose Mercury News has published a mixed review of iTMS competitor BuyMusic (BM). On the surface, the newspaper suggests BM is like a "ratty" discount store, but also says that like a discount store, if you hunt around enough, you'll find a bargain. From the Mercury News:

BuyMusic.com, the new legal music download service, is somewhat like a ratty discount store with clueless salespeople: You can occasionally find bargains on things you want, but you wouldn't hang around just for the ambience.

This is a stark contrast to Apple Computer's much-touted iTunes Music Store, launched April 28, which is clean, shiny and somewhat more expensive. But iTunes is only available to the 4 percent of home computer users in the United States with one of Apple's Macintosh computers, while BuyMusic.com works for the other 96 percent of us who run Windows.

The review, written by Mike Langberg, is the most detailed review of BM we have yet seen. As with most of the other reviews published on BM, Mr. Langberg documents some severe problems using the service, but still effectively recommends it to Windows users. The caveat to that is at the end of the piece, where he says "Just be prepared to ditch BuyMusic.com for something better as soon it comes along."

There's a lot more information in the full review at the Mercury News.

San Jose Mercury News Article