My profiles:
Do a couple searches on Buymusic.com and it's obvious they don't care about music at all. From spelling mistakes (for instance "Anne Peebles" -- it's Ann) to the underlying assumption that the track is the core product, this is an amateurish effort from a web delivery perspective, and an insult to the music lover.
A few things Buymusic.com needs to do to begin to be able to be taken seriously:
Here's a small test I did. I checked the availability of the albums I listened to between yesterday and today:
Well excuuuse me for my narrow sample, in two days I listened to 13 records of recent bluegrass and blues rock, various African music genres, soft jazz, hard bop, 60's and 70's soul, dance music released this year, and 14th and 16th century music. When I'm in the mood for metal or pop/rock, Buymusic's performance might be less dismal, but this is just to show that 20,000 albums is a ridiculously low selection.
Maybe the Itunes store's selection is slightly better though they carry a similar number of tracks, so it's probably about as restrictive. Napster 2.0 will launch on Wednesday with 500,000+ songs, which is slightly less dismal. Pricing at $10 an album will still be completely out of touch with the digital reality.
Here's the product I want: 200GB hard drives full of fully meta-tagged mp3 files that I can transfer to whatever device or media I want. Let me create my selection online and ship me the hard drive. I'd buy such a product for $1,500 (the price of the included hardware is just 10% and falling), and I'd buy one every 18 months. Basically an "All You Can Listen To" package geared to collectors and people who like me hate to know songs by heart and are in discovery mode day in, day out.
Why should anyone pay $50K+ to have a decent collection to enjoy with their friends and family when we're talking about a product that is mostly already amortized (we're talking about huge sleeping catalogs here) and that for the most part isn't generating any revenue anymore (because the backlist is unavailable online or even in most record stores). Put music in the fabric of people's lives, make it really pervasive, and you'll increase both the number of buyers and the absolute dollar value you'll extract from them. Only a very tiny number of artists benefit from the "major hit or nothing" mentality. And very few people buy more than 1,000 albums a decade anyway (or even during their whole life for that matter).
500,000 sales just to break even on an album, in this digital day and age? Give me a break, you incompetent lazy music execs. Stop considering music like a scarce product that people will only buy in very small quantities (people have what on average? 500 albums between their tapes and CDs and mp3s? That's musically illiterate by any measure, and they're most often exposed to few choices on broadcasting media). Instead of eating ever larger amounts of junk food, people might listen to more diverse music more often, if false scarcity wasn't created by middlemen.
The more I listen to new music (my collection is about at 200GB now, and I discover new stuff I never heard about *every day*) the more I realize how little I know. And there's a lot of quality in that quantity, provided you're not obsessed with an ultra-specific subgenre (a sure sign for me of someone who is buying into a lifestyle -- I'm a metal goth and you suck if you're not -- rather than loving music for all its emotional and intellectual power, which lies in its diversity).
04/13/04 update: Jim Griffin to Hugh Prestwood.
04/29/04 update: Josh Petersen: Happy birthday iTunes, my mainstream musical friend
08/21/04 update: Mark Cuban: HDTV, DVD, Hard Drives and the future:
"There is also the Netflix rental approach that could work as well. Pay 100 bucks for the first 200gbs external drive. Pay us 20 bucks a month, and we send you a new drive with the new goodies, and you send us back the one you just watched - Easy and breezy. Well, that is if consumers like working that way."
10/09/04 update: Wired: The Long Tail.