Music services changing to meet consumers’ downloading habits
The music industry is changing. Reluctantly.
After spending the past several years confused and confounded by the proliferation of music online, both legal and otherwise, the Recording Industry Association of America and the labels have accepted that downloading is the future of music, and the future is now.
It seems that every month brings a new online music service, using a variety of business models. Microsoft is in the beta testing stage of its new store, and Virgin Digital, a subsidiary of the company that brought us Virgin Megastores, recently opened an online storefront.
Apple’s iPods are being handed out to incoming students at some colleges. Other services are partnering with retail stores such as Best Buy and offering free trials to ensure maximum exposure in what is becoming an increasingly crowded and very competitive market.
There’s peer-to-peer file sharing, streaming content over high-speed connections and simple pay-per-
song downloading. So far, song selection is the great equalizer, and the size of an online music service’s catalog definitely matters. Pricing is also obviously important, but 99 cents per song looks to be the standard, with prices for full albums being a competitive variant.
There is no standard, but as always when new ways of generating googobs of money are discovered, a few companies figured out how to do it right and have risen to the top of the food chain.
iTunes
iTunes is arguably the blueprint for the future of music distribution. Recently, it announced its 150 millionth download (Beth Santisteven of Ignacio, Colo., bought “Ex-Factor” by Lauryn Hill, in case you were wondering) and also opened shop in Germany, France and the United Kingdom.
Once again, Apple was on the cutting edge of something big (and profitable). With its track record, it was able to forge relationships with all of the major labels, back when the record industry was still scrambling to adapt to the new technology and making examples out of 12-year-olds with massive, though mostly symbolic, lawsuits.
As makers of the iPods, the most popular digital music players, Apple has a virtual lock on the market. Being the biggest distributor of both the music and machine means that it is easily able to set up security measures that limit users’ ability to freely spread their purchased music. That’s a very big attraction for the labels and a major reason that the iTunes Music Store gets many exclusive tracks, including U2’s new single, “Vertigo,” and the first new song in 14 years by indie rock legends the Pixies. It boasts a library of more than 1 million tracks, including 5,000 audio books.
RealNetworks
RealNetworks has been around since the days of Windows 95, and it’s free. It is pretty much a standard component of any store-bought desktop PC.
The RealPlayer music store claims a healthy 763,303 tracks, including a very good jazz selection from the usual suspects, such as Miles Davis, to folks like Sun Ra and saxophonist Archie Shepp. It simply can’t match iTunes in terms of overall selection, but if you’re not desperate for the latest thing or hot exclusives (it has some, but they aren’t very impressive), Real’s music store is a worthy contender.
Napster
If you ask the music industry, the original Napster was the evil bogeyman that ruined the record business, the first big peer-to-peer network that connected the digital music collections of millions of people.
The industry blamed Napster for ending its 15-year streak of bathing in the cash generated by music fans replacing their old records and tapes with CDs.
Napster v.2 is a completely legal service owned by Roxio, makers of various digital media software, including programs people use to rip CDs. Napster has agreements with the big major labels and claims 700,000 tracks in its catalog.
Napster tries to foster a sense of community by giving users the option of viewing, in real time, what other connected users are listening to and browsing users’ collections. Its selection is decent, leaning on recent material, but it has a genre devoted to indie labels, such as Sub Pop, K7 and outre jazz champions ESP-Disk.
Kazaa
Kazaa appeared on the heels of the original Napster and sticks with the peer-to-peer (p2p) system, which means that when you start the program, your computer becomes part of a network of users. A recent court ruling determined that p2p software is legal, so users need not worry about the RIAA suing them or their children.
Obviously, for the whole shebang to work, users must be willing to share their own content, for which Kazaa rewards you with a participation level of high, medium or low.