RealPlayer Music Store's a "strong second"
updated 10:30 pm EST, Thu January 15, 2004
Real a \"strong second\"
The Mercury News says the new RealPlayer Music Store "gets my vote as the place to legally buy songs online," but "Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store is so elegantly crafted that it's hard to imagine anyone will do better in the near future." Launched Jan. 7, the RealPlayer Music Store follows a formula that's "now beginning to look familiar:" songs are 99 cents, most albums are $10. Users can burn the downloads to CD and transfer them to a set number of portable players.
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Jul 2001
does not support Mac OS
nor does Napster. Both require the download of an application, and unlike buymusic.com, are not accessible via a browser; although the buymusic.com site works on Safari, and IE for Mac OS, it attempts to detect your OS, and prevents full loading of the store front (on Safari it won't fully load, but you get a glimpse of it - in IE you can get full functionality, but it will keep popping up a window telling you that it only works on Windows and IE).
Interesting that none of the newer alternatives to iTunes fail to support Macs. Either they didn't feel that cost justified the benefit of developing for the Mac platform, or they didn't wish to compete with iTunes directly. Now, the buymusic.com site seems to only arbitrarily shut out Mac OS users; the site itself doesn't appear to reply on propreitary IE/ActiveX controls