— Although there are certainly plenty of candidates for the title, the No. 1 award-winner in the category of "still not getting it" would have to be the record industry — Sony Music, AOL Time Warner and the other members of the Big Five. Despite two years of fiddling, not to mention the more than six years since digital music first hit the mainstream, these conglomerates still don't have a clue what they're doing.
Last fall, most of the major record industry labels said they had gotten religion about the need for on-line offerings that would be more flexible and attractive for consumers, and would soon be revamping the two industry-led services — MusicNet and Pressplay. So what does AOL do? It launches, with much fanfare, a digital music service that is just as pathetic as anything available a year or even two years ago.
AOL launched its version of the MusicNet service last week, and the company is already claiming that it is the most popular on-line music service in the world. That probably isn't surprising, given the fact that the America Online service has about 27 million U.S. subscribers — although it does raise some questions about the average intelligence level of AOL's members, or at the very least their average income.
Like most other iterations of MusicNet (which is backed by AOL's Warner Music, Bertlesmann's BMG Music, EMI Music and software maker Real Networks) AOL's version has several different tiers of service. No doubt the company hopes to confuse people enough that it can grab a number of monthly payments before subscribers figure out how much they're paying and what they're getting. The lowest tier is $3.95 (U.S.) a month.
That may not sound unreasonable, but for $3.95 you get access to just 20 "streams" a month — that is, 20 songs played over the Internet like a radio, but not downloaded to your hard drive — and you are allowed to download 20 songs a month, but not allowed to burn them to a CD or to transfer them to a portable music player. If you stop paying your monthly fee, those songs you downloaded will no longer work. In other words, you are merely renting access to the music for $3.95 a month.
If you feel like paying $8.95 a month, you can get unlimited streams and an unlimited number of downloads, but you aren't allowed to burn any songs to a CD or transfer them to a portable player — two things that digital music fans want the most. And if you stop paying your monthly fees, the songs no longer work. Some people might be able to capture the music and save it in another format, but that's against the rules.
And if you feel like paying $17.95 a month — almost as much as some people pay for cellphone service — you get unlimited streams and downloads, plus you can burn songs to a CD. How many? No more than 10 songs per month, and only in standard music format rather than as MP3s. Of course, "ripping" those songs from a CD in MP3 format would be a fairly simple process, but that would also breach the terms of the service.
With AOL's version of MusicNet, you get access to 250,000 songs — less than half of the popular music now in circulation. It's also worth remembering that AOL users are already paying $23.95 a month for their AOL access, and some are paying a further $40 a month for a high-speed Internet connection. How many will want to pay between $9 and $18 a month so that they can listen to music on one computer or burn one CD?
Let's also remember that this kind of service — along with a similarly crippled service from Real Networks called RealOne — is meant to convince a few million music fans to stop downloading all the songs they want from free file-sharing networks such as Kazaa, Grokster, Morpheus or eDonkey. And AOL has been working on this new version of its music service since at least the latter half of 2001, when it launched a version of MusicNet and then pulled it off the market after negative reviews.
Listen.com's Rhapsody service comes closer to being attractive for digital music fans, charging $10 a month for a service that allows users to burn an unlimited number of songs onto CD for 99 cents each — but even then, less than half of the 285,000 songs available on the service are available for burning, due to restrictions imposed by the record companies that control the rights to those songs. And many of the most popular hits of the past 20 years aren't available on Rhapsody at all.
The record industry claims to have lost billions over the past few years due to unlicensed downloading. Looking at the kinds of services they have come up with, it makes you wonder who is most responsible for those losses — Kazaa users, or the industry itself.
E-mail Mathew Ingram at mingram@globeandmail.ca
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