Napster's Coming Back: This time it is legal

NAPSTER, the online song-swapping service that collapsed as a result of litigation from record companies, yesterday delighted millions of fans with the news that it would be back in business by Christmas.
Roxio, the software company that bought Napster at a bankruptcy auction last year, said it would relaunch the business as a legal service offering half a million songs for sale through either a subscription or fee-paying business model.
Chris Gorog, Roxio’s chief executive, said Napster’s internet site, once visited by more than 60 million globally, would be back in time for Christmas.
Napster, which allowed users to swap songs at no charge, collapsed in 2001 after it lost a copyright infringement lawsuit with record companies. The company is still the focus of a bitter legal wrangle between Bertelsmann, which invested more than $100 million in the service in 2000 and 2001, and rival record labels that accuse the German group of complicity in Napster’s copyright infringements. Bertelsmann rejects the accusation.
Despite Napster’s fall two years ago, it is still synonymous with online music, a phenomenon that Roxio aims to exploit.

That's cool. I headed over the Buymusic.com today to buy a CD. They told me that the service was for American customers only. Canadian's need not apply. Doh! Hopefully Napster will serve the entire continent.

Update: Maybe I am glad I couldn't buy anything. According to this Buymusic.com may be distributing illegally.

I did a search for one of my old CD's that will be going onto iTunes and It turns out my CD was there on BuyMusic.com. As were the CD's 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 by not paying them for CD's sold nor returning unsold CD's or cancelling contracts. So, without the express consent of what is likely lots of the Orchards 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 that were not asked for permission, and who will likely not see a penny of any sale made through BM. By their very own site policy they are committing copyright infringement. They have done this to lure PC/windows users to their site in hopes to sell the few major label aquired songs they do have, at a price that is much higher than Apple's $.99.

The Washington Post has some less than kind words for Buymusic.com as well.

BuyMusic.com, which debuted Tuesday under the unfortunate slogan "Get Loaded," breaks ground as the first Windows-based site to sell major-label songs without charging a subscription fee.
But its advertised prices -- "from 79 cents per song" and "from $7.95 per album" -- are misleading. CEO Scott Blum said 150,000 of the 300,000 tracks available retail at 99 cents, and 52,000 of them cost $1.04 to $1.99. Many albums cost $9.99 each, and a few go for $12.95.
BuyMusic's catalogue exhibits the usual annoying omissions (no Rolling Stones, for instance) and some unusual ones (22 of 201 U2 tracks and 69 of 143 Bruce Springsteen songs listed here can't be bought).
Shopping on BuyMusic.com is best described as Soviet. Purchasing a song required using Internet Explorer for Windows, clicking through a lengthy user agreement, entering payment info, checking out, then returning to an "order summary" page to download each track.
Four songs arrived as promised, but the download link for another song I'd bought didn't work on my test computer.
Wait, did I say "bought"? As the site's Orwellian user agreement states, you never buy anything, you only license a limited right to listen to it: Songs "are sublicensed to End Users and not sold, notwithstanding use of the terms 'sell,' 'purchase,' 'order,' or 'buy' on the Site or this Agreement."
Downloads, provided as 128-bit Windows Media Audio files, enforce widely varying limits on copying to other computers, portable music players and audio CDs.
Each time you move a song to a new PC -- if that's allowed at all -- you'll have to enter your BuyMusic.com user name and password so Windows Media Player can fetch a license from the site.
Songs can only be copied to "SDMI-compliant" players a set number of times. (The "Secure Digital Music Initiative" was a copy-control scheme that the recording industry gave up on years ago; good luck finding out whether your player supports it.)