Buy.com Venture in Music Retailing Skips at Country

Buy.com Inc., the Aliso Viejo-based online retailer, is having some trouble doing some buying of its own.

Last week, the company launched the redesign of its Web store, including opening its music retailing area. The company had acquired several domain names that would allow customers to go directly to the music genre that interested them the most by typing something like https://www.buyjazz.com or https://www.buyclassical.com.

When it comes to the largest music category in the country, however, Buy.com found that it was too late.

Buycountry.com had already been taken by the Nashville Network, a country music cable television operation that also owns the domain name country.com. Buy.com is still negotiating to acquire the buycountry.com domain name, a company spokeswoman said.

The music store is the first foray by Buy.com into a category in which the industry’s largest distributor is not controlled by a member of the Ingram family, a Tennessee clan that has made billions of dollars distributing books, music and computer hardware and software. This will also be the first time that Buy.com will use a non-Ingram company to fulfill its orders.

Previously, Buy.com sold computer hardware, software, video games, books and movie videos and used Ingram Micro Inc., Ingram Books Inc. and Ingram Entertainment as suppliers. For music, Buy.com will turn to industry leader Valley Media Inc., based in Woodland, Calif., for its distribution.

Buy.com has said that expansion into further areas will often be dictated by finding a single supplier with the broadest range of products in that category and generally partnering with the dominant distributor in that category. And in music, that’s Valley. In all of the areas into which the company has ventured so far, such suppliers are readily available.

But music is one of the few remaining consumer categories in which such a supplier exists. Toys, consumer electronics, sporting goods, jewelry and apparel all have rather dispersed distribution systems, while pharmaceuticals, food and hardware could pose significant branding challenges.

Jonathan Gaw covers technology and electronic commerce for The Times. He can be reached at (714) 966-7818 and at jonathan.gaw@latimes.com.