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BuyMusic.com Offers Tunes for Windows

Nonsubscription service markets copy-protected digital music.

Robert McMillan, IDG News Service

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Windows users now have a place to go for legal music downloads on the fly.

Scott Blum, the owner of online retailer Buy.com, has launched a new online music service called BuyMusic.com. His company is billing it as "the world's largest legal music download store."

Service Specs

The service will offer about 300,000 tracks from five major record labels and thousands of independent labels. The songs will cost between 79 cents and $1.29 per track. Albums will start at $7.95 and go to approximately $12, a company spokesperson says.

Music will be available for use on Windows Media Player version 9.0 and will come in the digital rights management-friendly Windows Media Audio format. This alternative to the more popular MP3 file format cannot be used for peer-to-peer file sharing on services such as Kazaa or Morpheus.

BuyMusic.com comes nearly three months after Apple's launch of its popular ITunes Music Store, which is averaging 100,000 downloads per day, according to Apple.

However, until Tuesday, no similar service had been available for Windows users. The several services sponsored by music labels require membership subscriptions to participate.

More to Come

"The race has been on, since ITunes was launched, to produce a similar service for the Windows market," says Josh Bernoff, a principal analyst with Forrester Research.

He expects a dozen more such services will pop up over the next year, including offerings from America Online, Roxio, Amazon.com, and Microsoft's MSN Internet service.

Because it has a variety of different download options--for example, some files offer free streaming of a portion of the song and some do not--BuyMusic.com is more complex than Apple's ITunes, Bernoff says. "But it's still significant in that it's the first Windows-based service that does not require a subscription," he adds.

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