BuyMusic was a paid online music store run by

Buy.com Rakuten.com/shop was an e-commerce marketplace based in San Mateo, California. Previously known as Buy.com, it was founded in 1997 by Scott Blum. In 2010, it was purchased by Japanese company Rakuten, and rebranded as Rakuten.com.Claire Cain Mil ...

History

The store was launched in July 2003 with 300,000 tracks available and was designed to compete with

iTunes Music Store The iTunes Store is a digital media store operated by Apple Inc. It opened on April 28, 2003, as a result of Steve Jobs' push to open a digital marketplace for music. As of April 2020, iTunes offered 60 million songs, 2.2 million apps, 25,000 ...

because at the time of launch,

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple fruit tree, trees are agriculture, cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, wh ...

's store was limited to

Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...

users, and BuyMusic was the first to offer paid downloads to non-Mac users. Unlike iTunes Music Store, the price of each song ranges from 80 ¢ to

US$ The United States dollar (symbol: $; code: USD; also abbreviated US$ or U.S. Dollar, to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies; referred to as the dollar, U.S. dollar, American dollar, or colloquially buck) is the official ...

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 using

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

and

Internet Explorer Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated IE or MSIE) is a series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft which was used in the Microsoft Wind ...

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 5.5 browsers. Before the spring 2004 integration with its parent site, Buy.com, users that did not meet the stated requirements couldn't even access

static content A static web page (sometimes called a flat page or a stationary page) is a web page that is delivered to the user's web browser exactly as stored, in contrast to dynamic web pages which are generated by a web application. Consequently, a static ...

such as press releases. Since the integration, all users can access all of buy.com. The site has provided no

statistics Statistics (from German language, German: ''wikt:Statistik#German, Statistik'', "description of a State (polity), state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of ...

regarding the number of customers and downloads, yet

Scott Blum Scott may refer to: Places Canada * Scott, Quebec, municipality in the Nouvelle-Beauce regional municipality in Quebec * Scott, Saskatchewan, a town in the Rural Municipality of Tramping Lake No. 380 * Rural Municipality of Scott No. 98, Sask ...

, founder and

CEO A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especially ...

of BuyMusic, noted "We're nowhere near

numbers." in a December 2003

interview An interview is a structured conversation where one participant asks questions, and the other provides answers.Merriam Webster DictionaryInterview Dictionary definition, Retrieved February 16, 2016 In common parlance, the word "interview" ...

. Though the download service's closure was never officially announced, it had quietly disappeared by December 2009, if not before; 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 to

Rakuten () is a Japanese technology conglomerate based in Tokyo, founded by Hiroshi Mikitani in 1997. Centered around Rakuten Ichiba, its businesses include financial services utilizing financial technology, as well as digital content and communicati ...

but now times out.

References

External links

Official WebsiteMusic Website
{{Music digital distribution platforms Online music stores of the United States