The Times: Tech column - Legal downloads/
By David Rowan
Would you pay for something that is otherwise free? It is a bet that the record industry is making, in the desperate hope that online file-traders, blamed for much of last year's 7 per cent slump in global music sales, will mend their ways and buy into its new subscription services. After all, in the 1980s we learnt to pay for drinking water.
Won't branding do the same for song downloads? The industry certainly hopes so, now that its legal battalions have failed to stem the rise of the free peer-to-peer websites - a position underlined by a US District Court judgment last Friday that neither Grokster nor StreamCast was liable for its users' song swaps.
So, in a can't-close-'em-join-'em spirit, the record labels have decided to take on the KaZaAs and Gnutellas by competing on service. Last week EMI said that it would offer 140,000 tracks for sale as downloads that could be stored on CDs or portable music players, and yesterday Apple, which has been eyeing up Universal Music for a while, announced its own music service in conjunction with the five main labels. If you are prepared to pay, you can now legally download many of the songs that the rest of us are acquiring free.
It is a start, and a welcome acknowledgement by the industry that it finally understands the distribution opportunities offered by the web. But the sites are not yet comprehensive or cheap enough to persuade users to go legit. First, licensing issues mean that though Bowie is available, the Beatles are not. The pay services ought to offer more content than their unregulated rivals, not less.
Secondly, if you subscribe to one site, you may be denied music legally available on another. So customers will wait for a single all-embracing site to emerge - an eBay of music. And, thirdly, you really need to love restrictive terms and conditions to enjoy playing this game. Even if you pay to listen to a single, you may have to pay again to download it to your PC and then once more to burn it on to a CD (and that's if you're allowed to do so). You never face such restrictions with Gnutella.
There are other constraints, too. Most of the legal services do not work with Macs, some demand that you live in America and MusicNet requires you to have an AOL account. So much for the comprehensive service-by-service reviews I had hoped to bring you. (Sorry, but I'm a British non-AOL mainly Mac user.) I've just signed up for various trials using a notebook PC, and will keep you updated - but my initial impression is that the prices are just too high and your freedom too limited, even if the songs sound perfect and you are offered intelligent suggestions for similar music.
With Rhapsody (at www.listen.com), for instance, you have unlimited access to 320,000 tracks for $9.95 a month (about £6.20), but must then pay 99 cents for each one you burn on to a CD. MusicMatch MX (www.musicmatch.com) offers unlimited streaming for $4.95 a month but won't let you download or burn. And so on.
According to the Jupiter Media research house, there are now just 300,000 subscribers for all the various pay music services. By contrast, KaZaA, the most popular unauthorised file-swapping software, has been downloaded 218 million times.
Madonna, for one, does not seem to appreciate how entrenched the file-swapping culture has become. She has lately been flooding the peer-to-peer networks with fake song files that claim to be her latest album tracks, but in fact contain a recording of her saying: "What the f*** do you think you're doing?"
Last weekend, she found that her official website had been hacked and links placed to pirated versions of the full album. "This," the hacker's message stated, "is what the f*** I think I'm doing."
(The Times, April 29 2003)
Would you pay for something that is otherwise free? It is a bet that the record industry is making, in the desperate hope that online file-traders, blamed for much of last year's 7 per cent slump in global music sales, will mend their ways and buy into its new subscription services. After all, in the 1980s we learnt to pay for drinking water.
Won't branding do the same for song downloads? The industry certainly hopes so, now that its legal battalions have failed to stem the rise of the free peer-to-peer websites - a position underlined by a US District Court judgment last Friday that neither Grokster nor StreamCast was liable for its users' song swaps.
So, in a can't-close-'em-join-'em spirit, the record labels have decided to take on the KaZaAs and Gnutellas by competing on service. Last week EMI said that it would offer 140,000 tracks for sale as downloads that could be stored on CDs or portable music players, and yesterday Apple, which has been eyeing up Universal Music for a while, announced its own music service in conjunction with the five main labels. If you are prepared to pay, you can now legally download many of the songs that the rest of us are acquiring free.
It is a start, and a welcome acknowledgement by the industry that it finally understands the distribution opportunities offered by the web. But the sites are not yet comprehensive or cheap enough to persuade users to go legit. First, licensing issues mean that though Bowie is available, the Beatles are not. The pay services ought to offer more content than their unregulated rivals, not less.
Secondly, if you subscribe to one site, you may be denied music legally available on another. So customers will wait for a single all-embracing site to emerge - an eBay of music. And, thirdly, you really need to love restrictive terms and conditions to enjoy playing this game. Even if you pay to listen to a single, you may have to pay again to download it to your PC and then once more to burn it on to a CD (and that's if you're allowed to do so). You never face such restrictions with Gnutella.
There are other constraints, too. Most of the legal services do not work with Macs, some demand that you live in America and MusicNet requires you to have an AOL account. So much for the comprehensive service-by-service reviews I had hoped to bring you. (Sorry, but I'm a British non-AOL mainly Mac user.) I've just signed up for various trials using a notebook PC, and will keep you updated - but my initial impression is that the prices are just too high and your freedom too limited, even if the songs sound perfect and you are offered intelligent suggestions for similar music.
With Rhapsody (at www.listen.com), for instance, you have unlimited access to 320,000 tracks for $9.95 a month (about £6.20), but must then pay 99 cents for each one you burn on to a CD. MusicMatch MX (www.musicmatch.com) offers unlimited streaming for $4.95 a month but won't let you download or burn. And so on.
According to the Jupiter Media research house, there are now just 300,000 subscribers for all the various pay music services. By contrast, KaZaA, the most popular unauthorised file-swapping software, has been downloaded 218 million times.
Madonna, for one, does not seem to appreciate how entrenched the file-swapping culture has become. She has lately been flooding the peer-to-peer networks with fake song files that claim to be her latest album tracks, but in fact contain a recording of her saying: "What the f*** do you think you're doing?"
Last weekend, she found that her official website had been hacked and links placed to pirated versions of the full album. "This," the hacker's message stated, "is what the f*** I think I'm doing."
(The Times, April 29 2003)
posted by David Rowan at Tuesday, April 29, 2003
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