http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/21/AR2006102100120_2.html
A Messy Age for Music
Confusion Reigns In the Expanding Digital World
By Mike Musgrove
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 22, 2006; F01
Ah, progress. It used to be that you just went out and bought a
compact disc and you didn't have to worry about whether it would work
on your player.
These days, in the age of digital distribution, we don't need to buy
CDs anymore. What we have, instead, are a bunch of online music
services, offering songs for sale or rent via quick download to a
bunch of digital music players that might or might not actually play
them.
Take music fan Chauncey Canfield: He has a whopping 180-gigabyte music
collection, an iPod and a smartphone he can fill with songs from his
subscription Yahoo Music account. But he can't put Yahoo Music songs
on his iPod, and he can't put songs purchased from the iTunes Music
Store on his phone.
Canfield knows that iTunes is the most popular online music store, but
he avoids it because of the playback restrictions. Instead, he prefers
to shop at eMusic, which sells its tracks in the MP3 format, an open
technology that works on every music player on the market. Even the
iPod.
"The fact that they don't have [anti-piracy controls] on them is
absolutely a major plus," he said. "I don't have to segregate my music
into various ghettos."
Thanks to competing file formats and business models, the digital
music world can be a little confusing -- and it's about to get more
so.
This holiday season, Microsoft and RealNetworks are bringing new
offerings to the market in an attempt to unseat Apple Computer, the
king of the digital music world. The two companies are, separately,
offering a new pair of devices and services that are tethered to each
other in the same way Apple's iPod is tethered to the company's iTunes
service.
Microsoft's $249 Zune will play songs sold from the company's coming
Zune Marketplace store. RealNetworks has teamed with retailer Best Buy
and memory-card maker SanDisk to offer a device that will work with
subscription programs such as RealNetworks' Rhapsody service. The
device, called a Sansa player, ranges from $139.99 to $249.99;
subscriptions to the service cost $15 per month. Both will also play
MP3 files, as does Apple's iPod and most other digital players.
It is too early to say whether these devices will affect sales of the
world's most successful player -- the iPod, which celebrates its fifth
birthday tomorrow. But the new would-be rivals will be following the
same strategy Apple has used with the iPod: The software, programs and
services that will supply music to the Zune and Sansa players are
incompatible with one another.
And neither player will work with the iTunes Music Store, the service
that holds the biggest chunk of the legal music-download market.
Other gadget-makers would love to sell devices that play iTunes
tracks, but Apple has declined to open the system to them. Other music
services would love to offer iPod-compatible tracks, but they can't,
for the same reason. The iPod and the iTunes store are connected to
each other in what is called a "closed" or "end-to-end" system.
At other online music stores, with major-league brand names such as
Napster, Yahoo Music and Rhapsody, it's possible to subscribe to music
collections or to buy hit songs for less than Apple's
99-cents-per-song download price. But because none of those offers
tracks that are playable on the iPod, none of them is nearly as
popular as iTunes.
Some countries have started to take the stance that iTunes has an
unfair advantage on the market. French lawmakers tried to get Apple to
open up its device to competitors earlier this year. Regulators in
Norway, Sweden and Denmark have also complained that Apple's practices
are unfair and have threatened legal action.
The U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust division has sided with
Apple so far. In September, Assistant Attorney General Thomas Barnett
asked the regulators in those countries to back down, taking the
approach that legal action in this area could slow innovation.
Even after scores of lawsuits from the recording industry against
users of file-sharing programs, nothing is quite as popular as
downloading for free. Some measurements show that the vast majority of
music downloads are still from underground file-trading programs such
as eDonkey and LimeWire. Research firm BigChampagne puts that figure
at 90 percent.
The eMusic subscription service has plans ranging from $10 to $20 a
month, allowing music fans to download 40 to 90 songs a month in the
open MP3 song format, a file type that pretty much every computer and
digital music player can read. Songs downloaded from eMusic can be
played on an iPod.
If there's a catch, it's this: eMusic's catalogue is limited to the
independent labels. There are plenty of famous artists, such as Miles
Davis and Creedence Clearwater Revival, but you probably won't be able
to get the latest hit song there.
"We're like the old indie record store on the corner," says eMusic
chief executive David Pakman. The service is second only to iTunes in
popularity. [See chart.]
It's possible that the major publishing labels could eventually warm
up to the MP3, some think -- even though the unprotected format has
long been blamed for the industry's woes. Yahoo has been loudly urging
the big four major music labels to allow their music to be sold
without the anti-piracy restrictions that keep a song file from
playing on some devices. This summer, Jessica Simpson's label, Epic
Records, let Yahoo sell one of her songs in the unprotected MP3 format
as an experiment.
RealNetworks chief executive Rob Glaser has often blasted Apple for
not opening its closed service to competitors. Two years ago, his
company offered a software program that made Real's service compatible
with iPods. But the service was not authorized by Apple, which accused
Real of behaving like a hacker. Apple released updates to the iTunes
software that later made the Real program, called Harmony, inoperable.
In an interview last week, Glaser didn't say whether he thinks the
world will eventually turn toward an open, interoperable system. But,
he said, it's an issue that is becoming more important to consumers as
more digital music players -- such as Sansa -- hit the market.
"It's hard to have a crystal ball on this one because the industry has
gone through so many twists and turns," he said.
Advocates of restriction-free music argue that the major labels may
eventually embrace the MP3 file format, or another such
restriction-free format, even though the file type has oft been cited
as a major cause of the industry's problem.
Here's the thinking. Complex new consumer technologies often start on
closed systems but then become more open as the market evolves. In the
early days of the computer, for example, some printers would only work
easily with certain types of computers, but today, that sort of
clunkiness is a distant memory. It isn't a perfect analogy, but those
who advocate open systems say, or at least hope, that the digital
music market will eventually go the same way.
Yahoo Music's director of product management, Ian Rogers, said he
would rather focus on building cool features to expose consumers to
new music. Instead, he said, his company is stuck enforcing digital
copyrights for tracks that are already being swapped for free on
file-sharing services anyway.
He said he hopes today's protected file formats will eventually go the
way of the Betamax videotape or other, now-obsolete music formats.
"I feel for anybody spending $10,000 to fill up an iPod today," he
said. "It's like spending $10,000 on eight-track tapes in 1978: You're
going to be super-bummed come 1990."
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