Buy.com’s Service Ready To Launch

The founder of Buy.com will launch his music service today, called BuyMusic.com, which caters to PC users and boasts the cheapest song download rates yet.

Catalog: more than 300,000 songs, about 100,000 more than iTunes but comparable to Pressplay. BuyMusic is charging 70 cents for individual song downloads — 9 cents lower than MusicNow, which previously had the lowest per song price. It’s also undercutting competitors’ price for a full album download at $7.95. The iTunes’ service charges $9.99 for most full albums.

Another drawback: the service was not able to obtain uniform licensing rights from the record labels and artists. As a result, different songs on BuyMusic have different restrictions for how often, if at all, they may be burned onto CDs or copied to other PCs or portable music devices.

Also read LA Times story (registration required): “Sources said Blum, unlike Apple’s Steve Jobs, didn’t press the record labels to relax their usage rules. Instead, according to one record label executive, Blum’s main concern was to get the service going as quickly as possible and beat rivals such as Amazon.com to market.”

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