Buy Music? Not From BuyMusic.com…
Posted by J.A.S.O.N. on 24 Jul 2003 at 11:28 pm | Tagged as: Entertainment
Via ScriptyGoddess
For anyone interested in signing up for the BuyMusic service, I would draw your attention to their privacy policy. In the first paragraph, they state”
“Our Internet Music Store allows you to download music, sign up for a gift registry, enter contests, receive special discounts, fill out surveys, and receive newsletters, e-mails or other promotional information from us. We presently use the information that we collect about you to facilitate your downloads, market more effectively to you and create a more personalized online experience. Except as limited below, we reserve the right to use or disclose your personally identifiable information for business reasons in whatever manner desired. We use a Digital Rights Management (\x{201C}DRM\x{201D}) structure to limit, control and protect intellectual property rights on the music downloads you purchase. We expect that use of DRM in the future could result in creative and more expanded uses of downloads and sometimes will require use of your personal information. You are only permitted to access our site, make purchases from it or download music if you are presently resident in the United States.”
This is in addition to the facts that it:
- Only works in IE
- Only works in Windows Media Player
- All files are DRM’d, so expect problems transferring your license.
- Each file has different license agreements with their respective record labels, so the amount of times you can download files or burn them to cd’s or transfer them to other devices.
Oh and in case you’re wondering, even though you paid for the songs, if you download them from a 2nd computer, it’s considered a secondary license which has no priviledges regaarding CD burning, transferring to other devices or anything other than listening to it in Windows Media Player.
Also, to burn CD’s you have to download a Roxio plugin that’s not quite stable. So god help you if it gets corrupted like Jennifer from ScriptyGoddess.com.
I’ll just wait until the PC version of iTunes comes out.
How is iTunes better? Don’t they have restrictions as well?
They have restrictions, but there’s no limit on the number of times you can burn songs to CDs. I’m not totally sure about the number of times you can download a song you’ve bought, though.
Basically, with iTunes, you buy it and you can transfer it to your iPod or CD as many times as you want without being hassled.
I realize that some can claim that the fact that the songs are limited to the iPod constitute a restriction in and of itself, but the difference is that there is no limit to the number of times I can transfer the music I’ve bought to that device. It’s also not limited to the windows platform. The wma files from buymusic.com have limitations to the number of times it can be transferred to another device, be it a player or CD. These restrictions also change per file, whereas the music from iTunes are the same across the board. I’m also not aware of any portable players that support encrypted wma files, though there may very well be.
Music from iTunes has the benefit of supporting multiple platforms (Windows, Mac and maybe, eventually, linux) and not having restriction placed upon the music you’ve purchased (OK, not totally true, the music has to be purchased from a US citizen within the US borders).
iTunes isn’t perfect, but a huge step in the right direction. I view buymusic.com as a step towards totalitarian control over what we listen to and what we can do with the music we purchase.
I like the fact that they underline the statement, “Except as limited below, we reserve the right to use or disclose your personally identifiable information for business reasons in whatever manner desired.” Gee, thanks. But no thanks…
dude, thanks for the heads up!
Buymusic is dull; there isn’t much interesting music there. Also, don’t buy an album there; it’s not much cheaper than Amazon or the local store, and you have to supply the blank, the case, and the cover art. But if they have the song you want, and you’re watching Kazaa dry up and / or you’re getting scared or feeling guilty about free downloads, it’s a possibility. It’s not hard to get around the restrictions.
The songs I downloaded, in wma format, were easily playable in Musicmatch, not just WMP. Also, I dragged them into the window of Roxio 6 and burned the CD from there. I doubt that they will be able to limit me to three burns there. Even if they could, I can burn a CD and then make more CDs from the original CD. I also can rip the CD tracks to MP3 and use on any portable, etc.