No Rock And Roll Fun

CAN YOU SPOT THE FATAL FLAW HERE?: Buy.com is floating a sister service, Buymusic.com, and it's going to sell downloads for seventy-nine cents a pop. So far, so iTunes-me-too. But what you actually get for money depends on what the record company licensing the track wants you to be able to do - so, some songs you can burn to CD; some you can only play on your machine. So, that's not a completely over-complicated system.

The other area where Scott Blum, the man whose idea it was (if you can call going 'we could do that, too' having an idea), might get his paws burned off is in his decision to have a 'multi-multi-milliondollar' TV advertising campaign to launch the service. As just35.com showed in the UK, spending bundles of cash advertising a website on television isn't any way to go about ensuring success - neither Amazon nor Ebay built their business on taking slots during Friends, and the huge projected spend for buymusic.com seems certain to push the profitabilty way off key.

No Rock prediction, which will come back to haunt us no doubt: Small burst of publicity; short struggle for profitabilty; quick sale for mark-down price to someone else in the electronic entertainment industries. I'd imagine both Microsoft and Yahoo have prepared cheques already.