Say, you know what we haven't done in a good long while? Bashed the dickens out of iTunes Music Store competitor BuyMusic.com. And really, we miss doing it, partly because the service was universally panned as the faintest shadow of the iTMS, partly because founder Scott Blum was actually clueless enough to think he was going sell a million songs a day, and mostly because BuyMusic's whole ad campaign consisted of three things: direct ripoffs of Apple's commercials; commercials that actually attacked the iTMS; and naked Tommy Lee. Ewwwwwww.

(If you want a newer reason, there's the fact-- as reported by the PowerPage-- that BuyMusic still claims to be the "World's Largest Download Music Store" despite reporting a catalog of 400,000 songs, versus Apple's 500,000.)

Of course, the reason why our BuyMusic bashing rate dropped from once-per-day to, well, nil is because the service made headlines for about a week and then practically disappeared. The last we'd heard about them was back in December, when Scott Blum admitted that his sales were "nowhere near [Apple's] numbers." (At the time, Apple's numbers amounted to 1.5 million per week. So much for a million a day, huh, Scott?) But we can get a few more digs in now, because BuyMusic is back in the news-- sort of. Faithful viewer Chris alerted us to a post by someone at SpyMac reporting that BuyMusic has emailed former customers to inform them that the service will soon be "integrated" into the Buy.com parent site. What that means, of course, is that pretty soon BuyMusic.com will cease to exist.

Now, before everyone does a happy dance on BuyMusic's grave, we think it's important to stress that, as of yet, that grave's still empty; BuyMusic.com isn't being shut down, but rather absorbed into the overall Buy.com experience. But that certainly implies that, $40 million ad campaign and naked Tommy Lee aside, the whole BuyMusic.com branding attempt was a dismal failure; either Blum thinks he can sell more songs as impulse buys to people already shopping for random junk at Buy.com (we know he certainly couldn't attract buyers who were actually looking for music), or this absorption is just the first step in a controlled collapse. There are about a zillion opinions on the subject over at Slashdot, if you're so inclined.

So is this the beginning of the music download shakeout? We think it probably is, and it's been coming for a while. Everybody knows that Apple sells a ton more songs than all the other services combined, and still just barely breaks even; it only keeps the iTMS running to sell more iPods. And if BuyMusic was "nowhere near" Apple's sales and Apple only recently passed the 50 million-song mark, it seems highly unlikely that BuyMusic has even recouped the $40 million wad it blew on its initial advertising, so we figure it's being absorbed for an eventual shutdown.

So who's next? Napster? MusicMatch? MyCokeMusic.com? Actually, at broadcast time, the MyCokeMusic server was unreachable; are they dropping like flies already? "Attention, all non-iTMS music download services: please line up against that bloodstained wall..."