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AnchorDesk

John Morris and Josh Taylor
How to make online music much, much better

John Morris and Josh Taylor
Contributing Editors, AnchorDesk
Tuesday, July 9, 2002
TalkBack!Add your opinion
Last week a New York Times  article (free registration required) suggested that entertainment companies were finally bowing to reality and offering more music online. One executive conceded that even if the companies were correct "morally and legally," it made little difference in a world where Kazaa, Roxio, and Sonicblue's Rio have become household words.

In the past few months, these companies have indeed been putting more of their catalogs online and quietly testing obvious features such as CD burning. But having tried several of these services, we can say there's still a long way to go before they will even begin to appeal to consumers.

Currently there are several choices for online music, though they aren't all directly comparable: Some offer just downloads, while others are streaming audio-only. The two big fishes--MusicNet and Pressplay--are supported by rival labels. Backed by BMG, EMI, and Warner, MusicNet is available through AOL or RealOne MusicPass, a part of RealNetworks's RealOne. Pressplay, a joint venture between Sony and Universal, is available directly or through several affiliates, including MP3.com, MSN, Roxio, Sony, and Yahoo. Then, of course, there are a smattering of indie services such as FullAudio's Listen Now, Listen.com's Rhapsody 1.5, EMusic, and Liquid Audio's BurnItFirst.

STILL WITH US? Good, 'cause now is when things start to get really confusing. Each of these services offers anywhere from one to four pricing plans ranging from $5 to $25 per month. On MusicNet and Pressplay, you'll get either a specific number of music downloads and/or audio streams per month. Most of the other services offer downloads only, except for Rhapsody, which is billed as a "celestial jukebox," and offers the opposite--an unlimited number of streams, but no downloads.

We won't even get started with having to "reactivate" songs that expire at the end of the month, as you have to do with MusicNet, or taking them back if you end your membership (as required by Music Now, Pressplay, and MusicNet). All of this is way too complicated. Note to music services: There's a reason people like all-you-can-eat Internet service plans.

The second problem with current online offerings is that the catalogs are woefully incomplete, despite the loads of press the services get when they sign new labels. Rhapsody recently became the first service to offer music from all five major record labels (BMG, EMI, Sony, Universal, and Warner). And FullAudio Music now has four of the major labels. But just because the service has a deal with a label doesn't mean you can get at all of the albums or songs from one of its artists, and often it's the big names that are missing.

Not only should we be able to access all of the songs on a particular album, we ought to be able to easily download the entire album, too--a feature MusicNet doesn't offer. Aren't these the same guys who have been forcing us to buy entire albums in stores for decades?

THIRD, THE MUSIC MUST BE portable. No one wants to pay for music that is chained to a PC at work or in a home office. You should be able to use it on more than one PC. And you ought to be able to transfer downloaded songs to any MP3 player, PDA, or other device that can play common digital audio formats. Pressplay offers sync a feature for multiple PCs, but only BurnItFirst and eMusic offer true support for portable players so far.

Finally, you should be able to make your own CDs without arbitrary limits. As its name implies, BurnItFirst lets you burn tracks to CDs, and Pressplay gives you a limited number of burns per month, but not all tracks are "burnable" and you can't include more than two tracks from a single artist on each CD. Warner has started to allow Music Now and MusicNet subscribers to transfer songs from its catalog onto CDs, in some cases for an additional fee. Other labels are planning to offer individual songs and albums for sale online in non-copy-protected formats so they can be transferred to portable players or CDs.

But the bottom line is, if we pay for RealOne MusicPass, for example, shouldn't we be able to burn a CD with any combination of music in its catalog, regardless of the artist, label, or day of the week?

SITES THAT DO OFFER some of these features have other serious limitations. For instance, for $10 to $15 a month, EMusic gives you an unlimited number of downloads which you can keep as long as you want, and put on a CD or MP3 player. But don't expect to find any big-name artists in its 220,000-track catalog; it covers only independent labels. Even worse, Liquid Audio's BurnItFirst lets you burn each song to a CD up to three times and transfer them to some players, but its catalog covers only EMI's Christian Music Group.

We're not underestimating the significant technical and business issues that still need to be resolved in order to provide these kinds of features in an online music service. Personally, we would be happy to pay a little more for a service that actually offers the full range of music and features we wanted. Hopefully the music companies have learned by now that if they don't deliver it, someone else will.

What do you want in a digital music service? What don't you want? And how much would you pay for it? TalkBack to us!

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