Buy.com launches digital music service
By Sandeep Junnarkar
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
July 22, 2003, 7:12 AM PT
NEW YORK--Buy.com on Tuesday launched a new digital music download service, hoping to reprise Apple Computer's early success with its iTunes music store.
The new site, BuyMusic.com, offers a catalog of more than 300,000 songs from the five major labels, including Warner Music and Universal Music Group, and from independent recording companies such as Island Records and Def Jam.
The service is charging 79 cents per downloaded song, which is one of the lowest rates for digital downloaded music, and $7.95 per album. The site caters only to people with computers running Microsoft Windows and the Windows Media Player 9 software.
The launch marks the beginning of what will likely be the entry of large e-commerce companies into the digital music world.
Much as iTunes helped drive sales of Apple's music players, Buy.com hopes to direct users of its service to its online stores.
"We have the BuyMusic store, which will have all kinds of devices for playing music, including digital music players, and CD-Rs as well," said Scott Blum, founder and CEO of Buy.com.
The company has earmarked about $40 million for an ad campaign that includes 2,050 television commercial spots over two weeks, 90 percent on national TV, Blum said. Despite the flurry of ads, he expects the service to grow slowly toward its goal of a million downloads a day. He expressed optimism about reaching that milestone by the end of the year, but also acknowledged that the service may never reach that level.
Apple, by contrast, soared in the first weeks after the iTunes launch in April, in what was widely seen as the most attractive pay-per-song music download service yet to hit the Internet. The company sold 5 million songs in iTunes' first eight weeks of operation.
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