While audiophiles obsess about extracting another iota of resolution from our already high-rez systems and recordings, the rest of the world is going crazy for portable music.Despite the legal shackles slapped on Napster, the MP3 format is alive and well. File-sharing continues unabated, and high-tech solid-state music players are one of the audio industry's hottest trends—a trend so hot that computer companies like Apple have eagerly joined the fray with devices like the iPod, a player no bigger than a cellular telephone, but capable of storing a thousand songs. If the experience of the past two years has proven anything, it's that the music-loving public has a seemingly unquenchable thirst for music to go.Two highly touted music sites backed by major record labels are likely to stumble right out of the gate, because their offerings won't be portable. Long in development and late in debuting, MusicNet and pressplay won't make their music available in the popular format. Instead of the by-default MP3 standard, the commercial download sites will format their tunes as Windows Media files, chosen for its compatibility with DRM ("digital rights management," or copy-prevention) technology, and its ability to carry a self-termination code that will make downloaded songs expire after the rental period.
The short and nasty is that for approximately $10 per month per subscriber, MusicNet (a joint venture by EMI, AOL Time Warner, and BMG Entertainment) and pressplay (Sony and Universal) plan to let members download music to their computers, but nowhere else. The sites' offerings will be coded in such a way as to inhibit export to any external device, a result of industry fears of losing control of distribution.Pre-launch publicity has it that the sites—originally scheduled to debut in the autumn of 2001—will function very much on the cable television model, in which subscribers pay a monthly fee to stay connected, or more accurately, on the pay-per-view model, in which you have to pay twice if you want to see a movie again. It's not clear how this offers any benefit to music fans, who with little effort can find the music they want for free on the Internet through the use of peer-to-peer file-sharing services, many of them originating outside the US and therefore beyond the reach of American copyright law. (Ineffectual pursuit of copyright violations has led some companies to push for legislatively mandated hardware solutions.)After numerous delays, the sites should go live sometime this winter. Many observers are predicting that they will quickly go nowhere. The disconnect between what they are planning to offer and what the public clearly wants is enormous, and an ill-conceived business model by MusicNet and pressplay will further hammer the music industry's battered bottom line. The pre-launch assessment of MusicNet and pressplay has therefore been almost entirely negative. They will undoubtedly attempt to overcome the resistance with costly advertising and public relations campaigns, while at the same time facing competition from digital satellite radio services Sirius and XM, which will get fully underway in the coming year, each of them predicting a more-or-less $10 monthly subscription fee. Other music services, such as cable-delivered DMX, offer plenty of value for the same price.
The consumer electronics industry has traditionally rushed to provide people with equipment that they want—the proliferation of MP3 players is simply the latest example. The mutually dependent audio and music industries have a long adversarial history; the origins of the current conflict lie in the introduction of the cassette recorder in the early 1970s. Divergent agendas between electronics manufacturers and music companies were at the heart of the Secure Digital Music Initiative's inability to come up with a workable model for copy protection.
