As we reported a few days ago, Buy.com has unleashed its online music service called BuyMusic.com, offering songs at $0.79 each and $7.95 for a full album, beating those rates from indirect competitor Apple's iTunes.

And when I say indirect competitor, I mean it, BuyMusic relies a lot on Microsoft technology, its infrastructure is based on .Net, it's catered to Windows users only, it features Windows Media Player as a preferred playback program, and hear this... works for Internet Explorer users only!
Anyway, we will further report on how BuyMusic business goes in the coming weeks, Buy.com executives I'm sure are expecting iTunes-like success at the very least with no competition on the Windows side yet.

Update: I'm hearing that not all songs & albums are subject to the same limitations or even prices (which is bad), for example while some albums can be burned/transferred unlimited times, there are others limited to 5 or so burns... in the other hand, iTunes works on a flat deal which IMO works better.

I finally managed to test BuyMusic.com on an XP machine...

[url]http://tingilinde.typepad.com/starstuff/2003/07/more_on_buymusi.html[/url]

...Or, I can go onto Kazaa, and get songs for $0.00 each, and albums for the bargain basement price of $0.00 !!!

If you have broadband, and know a little about P2P, IRC, and so forth, all you have to do is think about a song, and you can have it.

Indeed, the biggest problem is finding out who sang what, what was the name of that song I heard and liked but had no idea who even sang, etc.

Now, a service that catered to that I WOULD pay for!

Still, this is good news that people are coming around to realising that the current price of music is ridiculous, a total con and a rip off, and that consumers will not stand for it when they have technological alternatives....

I agree, these prople have been ripping us off for decades with everything, just to get themselves rich. I understand they work hard to get where they are, but seriously do they really need to make that much money per cd made? It is like professional athletes, I would think you can get by on a few million a year, yet they still ask for 8-15 million a year. Why? If they love the game just get enough to get you by and maybe a little more.