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BuyMusic.com VS. Kazaa

The music industry ( aka. The RIAA ) and Microsoft just gave blessing to Buy.com's new venture BuyMusic.com. I am a total multimedia nerd and I was drawn to try it out. In fact I pay my bills as a multimedia nerd so I was compelled to cut through the hype and put together a document that captures the BuyMusic.com user experience and compare it to a more popular but black market music distribution network.

The concept of a digital music store is not a new one and there has been several failed attempts to pull it off and some digital music file formats that have faded into neglected history. Apple will go down in history as creating the first commercially successful on line digital music store. The Apple Music Store showed the world what legit digital music could be like but it only worked on Macintosh computers with the most updated software.

I just want to go on the record and say that I am not against the concept of paying for on line digital content. In fact I am all for it but I am worried about if the market is ready for widespread DRM technologies. There is so much not know about how DRM built into an OS will go over with your average user. Artists do need to get paid but I am bothered by my money going thought the greedy claws of the RIAA. I only wanted to buy one 99 cent song so I am hardly making the RIAA wallets fat of this one song. If there was a way to get rid of the RIAA monopoly and just give my cash straight to the artist I would be the first in line. I wonder how much the artists actually get out of the 99 cents per song?

They picked Tommy Lee to be their celebrity spokes person. Can you believe that? I mean the former drummer of Motley Crue who is best known for bootleg videos of him and his former wife doing the nasty. I also want to point out that the aryan poster child they have it their training video is super annoying. But enough of that.

They also have these ads of people singing to the music on a white back drop that is such a blatant rip-off of Apple's ad campaign that I really think that Apple should sue over the ads. I mean they are cute but they are intellectual property theft. I thought corporate rock was not into copyright theft?

First I went to BuyMusic.com in Mozilla my default web browser. I was a bit miffed to see a big notice telling me that they were not going to let me in unless I was going to use IE 5 or higher on Windows only. The Apple Music store uses a proprietary format are requires a Mac. This site uses Windows Media 9 on Windows 98 or higher. That is forgivable and understandable because of the lack of cross platform Digital Restriction Management technologies. Microsoft has put a heck of a lot of money into the DRM features of Window Media 9 and this is a big test for the marketability of the format. To learn more about the Windows Media DRM market I suggest the Wired article Bill Gates, Entertainment God. I guess that this is a good thing rather than having competing music formats and in compatibilities between different on line music store.

On to creating an account..

First off there is a legal agreement the size of a term paper and I am sure that I just signed away my rights for them to install spy ware and tap my phone line. I bet I just joined the NRA in some small line of the legal agreement. So I signed over the music rights to my first born child and proceeded to the next screen.

Then you hand over all your personal information including where you live, how to contact you and your credit card information. At this point I wish I spent more time reading the legal agreement and looked for a privacy statement. I have been burned in the past and I get a funny feeling in my gut every time I have to drop my pants and bend over to present all my personal contact data.

Here is the fun part. Shopping for music... Or is it?

BuyMusic claims that they have 300,000 songs to choose from but it looks like they picked most of them from the music department at Wal-Mart. Here you will find the most sold corporate rock drivel in massive quantities. I was a wee bothered to see that there is no Techno, Electronica, Dance or electronic music section but there was a search box so I started typing in the names of my favorite artists.

Currently in the catalog there is
No The Prodigy
No Fat Boy Slim
No Dance Dance Revolution
Only one Moby album that I already have
Only one Daft Punk song
No William Shatner's Transformed Man
No The Doors
No Led Zeppelin
No The Beatles
No KMFDM
No FSOL
Only one Chemical Brothers track That I already have
Actually have two Nirvana Albums but I own both of them
They actually all the albums by the Pet Shop Boys ( Go West on Very was not available for single download) Damn!
No Queen
No DJ Tricky
Only One DJ Shadow Album that I already have.

After a total of 39 minutes since I first started shopping here I picked Take a Chance on Me by A Teens off the album The Abba Generation. I am a sucker for techno covers of 70s Swedish disco hits.

I selected the track I wanted and then checked out. I was allowed to download the song at a speedy 100 Kbs over my cable modem. Then I closed IE ( you can't actually quit IE ) and double clicked the WMA sound file. It opened Winamp 3 my default music player but it did not play or give me an error message. Just nothing. I tried loading it again in Winamp but no luck. I then switched the file preference so that WMAs will open up in Windows Media Player 9. I got a dialog box about how it was implementing the DRM permissions to the file. It was altering the music file so it would only play on this machine with this CPU and this install of Windows in this media player. Oh Joy! I like to listen to my music at work and frequently burn CDs full of MP3s and WMAs to listen while I make 3d graphics and multimedia. I would now have to burn this as an Audio CD if I wanted to listen to it at work or in a normal CD player.

So how did it sound. Perfect. It sounded great and it rocked my Sony head phones with the melodic hypnotic sounds that only an ABBA song can.

The file was titled A_Teens - 8 - Take A Chance On Me.wma and took up 3.56 MB of disk space.
This was about 45 minutes after I first started this test so I thought I would see if I could get the same song of Kazaa and how long it would take me.

I started up Kazaa K++ with RIAA IP blocking enabled. After a quick search by the song title I found a number of likely candidates and picked one with a good upload speed. When I was done I logged off the network and quit the program. Then entire affair took less than three minutes. There was also songs from all the artists that I could not find on BuyMusic.com. I already own this album on CD so I am using my free use to this media. The file Abba Teens -08- Take A Chance On Me.mp3 sounded perfect but was 5.29 MB of disk space.

BuyMusic.com has a set of permissions on each file they sell. These are,
Number of computers you can install the song on
Number of times that the song can be transferred to a Windows Media 9 Approved digital music player.
Number of times that the song can be burned to a CD.

Just burning the file to a CD or transferring it to server is not going to cut it. The file needs to have permission to play and it can be traced back to the original buyer. That is what Digital Restriction Management is all about. I guess we better get used to it because it is going to be a major part of the next version of Windows and there is nothing we can do to stop or disable it. If you do not play by the rules you do not get to use or copy DRM encrypted files. Just wait until software stops working and you have to pay for a minor upgrade to get it working again, or the DRM system fails and you are locked out of your music and files.

I had permission to make a Audio CD of this song using Windows Media Player so I plopped in a blank CDR and toasted up a CD. To my glee it was a standard compliant audio CD that is very compatible. Also there is no DRM on the CD so I was able to rip it to a MP3 file but with no DRM restrictions. The new MP3 file was 3.57 MB of disk space. Thank God blank CDs are dirt cheap (But not in Canada where there are tariffs on them). There is DRM it just does a half ass job at protecting the music and is mostly annoying to anyone with a brain.

One of the best things about BuyMusic.com is that it is going to show consumers a first hand experience as to what a DRM based file management system is going to be like. I am sure that it is going to be a cold glass of water thrown right in their face. BuyMusic.com is doing the right thing and is making a music store just like Apple's but with Microsoft only technology. They need to attract much more artists and labels. They need to put entire libraries of music out on the digital shelves from around the world. If I really wanted to get the MTV TRL shit I would just stop by the Wal-Mart music department.

This is a sign of things to come but it is too early to tell if it is going to be a good or bad thing. The RIAA just got some pennies from me and that is a bad thing.

Jake at July 24, 2003 Stuff

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Comments

Posted by: tj at July 24, 2003 5:44 AM

Posted by: pellinore at July 24, 2003 10:12 AM

Posted by: lilly at July 24, 2003 12:59 PM

Posted by: Jake at July 24, 2003 1:13 PM

Posted by: Lynne at July 24, 2003 9:35 PM

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