Digital Music Still Has a Ways to Go More Choices Are Better for Consumers, But Enough With the Scavenger Hunts
By Jason Fry Wall Street Journal July 7, 2008 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121502236051523527.html?mod=2_1571_leftbox Last week Rhapsody expanded its subscription-music service to include downloads (as DRM-free, 256-Kbps MP3s), the ability to preview 25 full tracks per month, and tie-ins with the likes of Yahoo, corporate co-parent MTV Networks, Verizon Wireless and iLike. By selling DRM-free MP3s, Rhapsody (a joint venture of RealNetworks and Viacom unit MTV) joins the likes of eMusic, Napster, Wal-Mart, Amazon, and of course Apple's iTunes, though today the 800-pound gorilla of online music can only sell DRM-free songs from EMI -- the other three major labels have so far frozen out Apple when it comes to unfettered music, an attempt to beef up Apple's rivals and thereby improve the labels' bargaining power. That's the latest chapter in a soap opera whose storylines of bitterness and attempted betrayal are positively Gothic, but at least this time consumers are benefiting instead of being punished. Today consumers have a growing number of legal, unfettered choices for digital music, and they all work smoothly with iTunes. The more likely it is that consumers can find songs they want and listen to them easily, the more likely they are to buy them instead of swiping them. The overall trend is a welcome one, and dust-ups between Apple and the labels (however entertaining they may be) are unlikely to derail that. But the Rhapsody announcement raises questions, too -- ones that have dogged digital music for some time. Yes, more choices are better, but buying digital music is still a needlessly complicated, haphazard process. And why are subscription services like Rhapsody's core product so stubbornly stillborn? I responded to Rhapsody's announcement immediately, but that's because I wanted to download a song that only Rhapsody had: the Del Fuegos' cover of the Everly Brothers' "Crying in the Rain," an ultra-obscure track by one of my favorite defunct bands. Now I have the MP3, and my longstanding bookmark of the Rhapsody stream is no more. (One long-sought song down, hundreds to go.) My quest for "Crying in the Rain" is an example of one of digital music's continuing annoyances: Swiss cheese availability. I'm happy I now have a download of the song I wanted, but why did I have to try a hodgepodge of digital-music services to find it? One review of Rhapsody's new services dismissed them as unexciting, asking what Rhapsody was doing to stand out. To me, that criticism misses the point: Digital music is no longer new, and at this stage in the game it needs to be less exciting. It should be reliable and simple, and too often it isn't. If you want to buy a song today, you frequently have to hunt through the catalog of several digital-music services. Liz Phair just reissued her landmark 1993 album "Exile in Guyville" with three bonus tracks, which I wanted. But where to go? Napster and Rhapsody didn't have the reissue version of "Exile" at all. (And Napster's cluttered, confusing service gave me a headache.) ITunes had the "Exile" reissue, but I could only get the new tracks by buying the entire album -- for a ludicrous $12. The tracks were also album-only at Amazon, though the full album cost a more-reasonable $9. But eMusic offered those tracks individually, and they'd be included in the 30 downloads a month I get for $12. Score! Hunting around some more on Rhapsody, I found a 2007 EP by indie chanteuse Juliana Hatfield that I'd somehow missed. But wait -- maybe it was on eMusic too. It was, so I cleared my Rhapsody cart without buying. Later, I checked to see if iTunes had the EP. It did -- and their version had an extra track. Retailer-exclusive bonus tracks are a growing annoyance for music fans -- with a special place in Hell reserved for whoever masterminded the 10 exclusive songs spread across various online, offline and Japanese versions of Pete Yorn's 2006 album "Nightcrawler." (To be fair, Mr. Yorn encouraged his fans to trade the bonus tracks on his own message board.) The Hold Steady's much-discussed new album? It's iTunes-only right now, which at least made my decision straightforward. And no service has freed several songs from "The Essential Bruce Springsteen" from the album-only shackles -- I check every couple of months. Maybe next time. Can you imagine if this were the way books or DVDs worked? Picture if you had to click around between Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Borders to find three different books on the bestseller list, or if a new short-story collection came with extra stories depending on where you shopped, and you had to find all this out by trial and error. Compared to buying a book or a DVD, buying a song online is a scavenger hunt -- exciting, perhaps, but also thoroughly annoying. And there's a larger issue here: Why are the digital-music choices all variations on a theme? Rhapsody hasn't abandoned its all-you-can-eat subscription model, which lets you browse and listen to millions of songs for a monthly fee -- pretty close to the "celestial jukebox" talked up by music fans for years. But the celestial-jukebox model remains largely grounded, despite its theoretical elegance. Subscription plans like Rhapsody's sound, look and feel much like jukebox software -- you can bookmark artists, build playlists and do most anything you can with jukebox software like iTunes. Who cares that the songs sit on someone else's hard drive instead of yours? But for whatever reason, consumers do. Dave Goldberg, the co-founder of Launch and general manager of Yahoo Music before moving to Benchmark Capital, sees subscription services' problem as threefold: devices, prices and billing. He notes that people want to listen to digital music not just at their PCs and on their MP3 players, but in the living room and in the car. Yet there are still technological hurdles for making a subscription service truly ubiquitous -- he sees current services at "an interim stage of incompatibility." A related problem, he says, is price -- he thinks current monthly prices ($12 to $15 at Rhapsody and Napster to Go) are too high given that subscription services are an adjunct to other methods of consuming music, not a replacement for them. (This was what ultimately made me leave Rhapsody -- I liked the service, but I spent a lot more time listening to things I'd already downloaded on iTunes than I did using Rhapsody to try out new tracks.) But it's Mr. Goldberg's final issue that seems most ominous for the music industry. He notes that the subscription model should be a good fit for kids, who consume lots of music in intensely social ways and are fickle in their tastes. But to use such services, they need a credit card. (The same problem exists with legal downloads.) By missing out on a young audience, subscription services wind up battling with download sites over older consumers -- who consistently opt for downloads over streams. Mr. Goldberg is optimistic that lower prices and technological advances will ultimately help subscription services succeed, grabbing as many as 20 million subscribers instead of his estimate of about 2 million today. But he worries that the legacy of not paying for music will limit that success. "It's really easy to get music free and illegally, and actually hard to pay for it," he notes. "Usually it's the other way around, right?" ================================ George Antunes, Political Science Dept University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204 Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927 antunes at uh dot edu ******************************* * POST TO [EMAIL PROTECTED] * ******************************* Medianews mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
