Post-Napster, let there be light, please

Post-Napster, let
there be light, please

Big record labels are cutting wacky download deals

By Andy Wang

    Last week was certainly a busy week in the music industry. The bold proclamations came day after day as the Big Five music labels, along with companies including MTV, Microsoft and RealNetworks, announced digital music initiatives.
     But you can hardly call this a productive week .The industry still seems like it’s full of people who don’t understand the web.
     Until the music business creates a one-stop, all-you-can-eat destination for digital music, the piracy will continue. And it may even get worse as users who are willing to pay simply say the hell with it, because it’s too confusing to figure who they should pay.
     Despite all the hype and bluster that surrounded last week’s announcements, nothing was really accomplished. Nothing that will help the record labels, that is. If anything, the music industry may have simply convinced more people to steal.
      The main problem is that there still hasn’t been a deal made that will allow a music lover to pay one single subscription fee for music from all the major labels. By creating separate ventures, the labels are chopping up a huge pie--and absolutely confounding consumers.
      Let’s (try to) break it down: AOL Time Warner, Bertelsmann--which essentially controls Napster now--and EMI are joining forces with RealNetworks to form a subscription service called MusicNet. The other two Big Five labels, Sony and Vivendi Universal--which has agreed to buy EMusic.com--are working on a service with Yahoo called Duet. Neither of these much-ballyhooed initiatives will launch until at least the summer.
      Meanwhile, MTV will use RioPort’s technology to sell singles from all the major labels online, and Microsoft has launched a new digital music site.
      There were other announcements too, but this is clearly enough to digest for now. This was the type of week that gives analysts headaches and makes journalists long for a simple chart that explains everything.
   Does anybody really expect consumers to attempt to figure this out?
       Here’s the thing about music: People listen to it for pleasure. They listen to it to relax and fall in love and forget about their daily toil.
      Do you think they’re really going to want to navigate through a maze only to find out that they have to go two different places for two songs? Can you imagine them wanting to conduct a cost-benefit analysis on whether it makes more sense to subscribe to MusicNet and Duet or pay by the song on MTV’s service?
    And here’s the thing about web users: They already aren’t inclined to pay for anything. (Seventy-seven percent of people who responded to a recent Consumers Electronics Association survey said that they opposed spending money on content such as music, games or news.) They might pay if somebody makes things easier for them, but this clearly isn’t happening with digital music right now.
     Napster worked not because its technology is great--in fact, the programming is considered somewhat sloppy--but because it is so simple to use.
     The record industry thought that monitoring Napster for copyrighted files would slow down the exchange of free music. But after a brief traffic decline, Napster’s usage is climbing again, and music fans can still use Napster to find songs by most major artists.
       And of course, there are also file-sharing services like Aimster and Gnutella, which are gaining new followers at the same time the music industry is trying to figure out how to make people pay.
       The only viable solution, short of an unlikely merger, might be to get MusicNet and Duet to charge a single subscription fee for both services and create a shared search engine. This would render many of the other industry developments irrelevant and give music lovers the opportunity to find almost any tune they want at one place for one price. (There is, of course, music from independent labels that will always be harder to get.)
       The music industry clearly wants the music-downloading world to pay. Fine, give them something worth paying for.

-Andy Wang is features editor for Gear magazine and founder of Ironminds.com

Printer-Friendly Version | Send to a Friend
Cover Page | Contact Us