From macintouch:
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.
Hey Jody.
ceo AT l-i-e DOT com here, from MusicThoughts etc.
Unfortunately, the contract an artist signs with The Orchard is *SO* *BAD* that you probably *DID* give them permission to do that to your music…
It sucks, but what do you expect from The Orchard at this point?
They’ve routinely shown themselves to have no ethics whatsoever…
All I can suggest is having a lawyer read contracts before signing them — Their contract was always so horrible…