Learning to live with legal music services

September 2, 2003

GristyMcFisty submitted
an article with the title 'learning to live with legal music services'.In the past number of years of
fearing and fighting against users making their MP3's publicly available, it is
only recently that legal services have started providing downloadable
tracks. With all the headlines about the 'RIAA fighting this and sueing
that' it is clear that filesharing networks are a real threat to legal download
services. Various tatics are used by the RIAA such as flooding fake songs,
tracing MP3's by using hashes and examing their headers for clues and by sueing
users as we all know already.

Must legal download services provide tracks for around $ 1 per song and albums for around $ 10 per album, but unlike the peer-to-peer networks there is not as much variety to choose from. Some artists refuse to make individual tracks available as they want their customers to buy their full ablums.

Some services such as Rhapsody
require a subscription, some are available to specific countries and MSN uses a
credit system for purchasing tracks. Each service has their own
restrictions on what can be done with purchased downloads. To play back
tracks some services may require a proprietary media player or portable player.
Some services do not allow their tracks to be recorded to CD or transferred to a
portable player. Unlike peer-to-peer networks, users are not faced with
repetitve downloads to try and get a good quality, complete and correct
song.

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - After five years of regarding one another
with fear and contempt, the music and technology industries are finally
rolling out services that aim to make a business out of downloading music.

Competing with free music services like Kazaa and Morpheus is not
an enviable position for anyone. But with the record industry suing
individual users of those services for copyright infringement, consumers
will almost certainly be looking for viable alternatives.

In the last four months, companies like Apple Computer Inc.,
Microsoft Corp., RealNetworks Inc. and BuyMusic.com, have struck licensing
deals with the world's largest record companies to begin offering
alternatives that allow users to download individual songs for around
each.

The services all perform differently. You will be disappointed if
you're looking for the wide selection that the free services offer. Some
sites are easier to navigate than others. Unlike most conventional CDs,
there are limitations to how many times you can copy a song you've bought.
And of course, you have to pay.

"They've been designed around how the industry wants to sell music,
rather than how consumers want to buy it," says senior analyst Rebecca
Jennings at Forrester Research in London.

On the positive side, you can buy downloads of complete albums more
cheaply than buying the compact discs in stores. In most cases, the
quality and speed of downloads are more reliable -- and you won't get sued
for using them.

There are some features
missing from most legal services that put off users. The main feature
customers want is the ability their music record to CD, i.e. make a hard copy or
back up. The next is the ability to to transfer to an MP3 player, i.e.
what's the point of getting an MP3 player if you cannot put your music on
it? Finally, most users want to be able to download the tracks they want
and not have to purchase a full album just to get a few songs from an
Artist.

In my opinion, the ideal
service is one where I can download the tracks I like at a reasonable price,
back them up on CD, be able to make my own custom made CDs using the downloaded
tracks and play them back in any media player with an add-on plugin. So
far, despite the Macintosh population being very small, iTunes has proven very
successful and it does show that a legal download service can be successful if
they only would just listen to what their customers
want.

Source: Yahoo! Technology News