MacInTouch Home Page: Apple/Macintosh news, information and analysis: "Musician Jody Whitesides emailed us with an interesting perspective on Buymusic.com, the new Windows competitor to Apple's iTunes Music Store:



My name is Jody Whitesides, I'm an artist that is about to be brought to the Apple iTunes Music Store. Of course I recently heard about BuyMusic so I decided to point my Mac browser at it (with Javascript turned off you can see the site).

I did a search for one of my old CDs that will be going onto iTunes and It turns out my CD was there on BuyMusic.com, as were the CDs of several other bands that I'm friends with - all of whom were not contacted about being placed for sale there.

Here's what I've deduced... BuyMusic.com (which I will refer to as BM) got their 'vast' music library of 300,000 plus songs from a company called The Orchard. The Orchard is a distribution company that has consistently shafted artists [...] So, without the express consent of what is likely lots of The Orchard's catalog, BM has put it up for sale at the bargain price of $.79 a song.

So, now they can tout they're selling tracks at $.79, and they can say they have a library of music of over 300,000 songs. But what they don't tell you is that it comes from musicians/bands who were not asked for permission, and who will likely not see a penny of any sale made through BM. [...]

I'm currently looking into legal means to have my music removed from their site and strongly encourage users to not browse BM's site nor purchase from it."