 | This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "BuyMusic" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(January 2009) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Type of site | Music downloads |
|---|---|
| URL | www |
| Launched | July 2003; 21 years ago (2003-07) |
BuyMusic was a paidonline music store run byBuy.com.
The store was launched in July 2003 with 300,000tracks available[1] and was designed to compete withiTunes Music Store because at the time of launch,Apple's store was limited toMacintosh users, and BuyMusic was the first to offer paiddownloads to non-Mac users. Unlike iTunes Music Store, the price of each song ranges from 80¢ toUS$1.99. Reportedly in 2003, the site claimed to be "The World’s Largest Download Music Store."
The site used to have extreme limitations on what users could browse. It would not allow anyone not usingMicrosoft Windows andInternet Explorer 5.0 or greater to even view the songs available. Even users that met the stated requirements could encounter trouble—clicking the main "click here" link routinely crashed some user's IE 5.5browsers. Before the spring 2004 integration with its parent site, Buy.com,[2] users that did not meet the stated requirements couldn't even accessstatic content such aspress releases. Since the integration, all users can access all of Buy.com.
The site has provided nostatistics regarding the number ofcustomers and downloads, yetScott Blum, founder andCEO of BuyMusic, noted "We're nowhere nearApple'siTunes Music Store numbers." in a December 2003interview.
Though the download service's closure was never officially announced, it had quietly disappeared by December 2009, if not before;[3] Buy.com's press releases stopped mentioning it sometime in 2007. The buymusic.com URL formerly redirected to Buy.com's physical CD store, and later redirects toRakuten but now times out.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)