A Side-By-Side Comparison of the Three Top Players
For all the clamor that Napster created during its meteoric rise to digital music infamy, it sure has been quiet in the online music world since Napster's departure last summer. That is until last month, when three music subscription services -- PressPlay, MusicNet on RealOne, and Listen.com’s Rhapsody -- all launched with hopes to fill the vacancy Napster left behind. If you’re a potential consumer, get ready to be confused. All three have different catalogs of music, different methods of distribution, different application interfaces and different business models.
First is PressPlay (www.pressplay.com), a joint venture between Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group. The company’s counting on traffic to three affiliates, MSN, Roxio, and Yahoo!, to attract attention to its application.
The second player is MusicNet (www.musicnet.com), a music provider formed through an assemblage of content and distribution partners that include RealNetworks, AOL Time Warner, Bertelsmann, and EMI Group. RealNetworks’ latest player, RealOne, acts as the distribution vehicle for MusicNet. The company’s hope for success rides on the install base for RealPlayer and RealJukebox, which according to RealNetworks is a whopping 235 million total registered users.
And finally, there’s Rhapsody from Listen.com (www.listen.com), which has already played the role of independent music service provider for four years, and has recently signed licensing deals with EMI, BMG, and Sony Music. Listen.com looks to sell Rhapsody as a value added service to distribution partners like ISPs and broadband providers. The first such licensee is ISP partner, Speakeasy (www.speakeasy.net).
The User Experience: Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS)
A review of MusicNet requires a consideration of all other RealOne services, since to the user it’s hard to tell where MusicNet’s services begin and end. That’s because RealOne is clouded with multiple services like premium audio and video, CD burning and web browsing. With the addition of each one, RealOne invites competition from another industry category, and except for its premium news and sports content, it doesn’t have a leg up anywhere else. The RealOne player is slow -- before a RealOne user can arrive at MusicNet, he must bypass advertisements and web pages that have nothing to do with digital music.
The most attractive aspect of MusicNet is its large catalog: 75,000 tracks at launch. Unfortunately, that runs contrary to its least attractive aspect, which is all downloaded songs expire after 30 days. That’s like buying a CD and throwing it out after a month. If that’s not quick to irritate, there’s an ever-present counter that chronically reminds you of streaming and downloading limits.
Like MusicNet, PressPlay also has streaming and downloading restrictions. And unlike the consistency of listening to music on CD, music quality on both services changes if it’s streamed or downloaded (see sidebar for encode rates). Since both applications require a dedicated broadband connection, making the distinction between downloading vs. streaming is pointless to the user since the services don’t let you take music off the machine.
PressPlay is the only one that can take music off your desktop computer with its CD-burning option. That feature is a bit misleading, because PressPlay’s CD recording comes with severe restrictions -- only a select number of tracks are deemed burnable and you can only burn up to two tracks per artist for each billing period. Good luck finding enough tracks to fill up just one CD.
The reason for all these restrictions is that the leap from streamed content to downloadable content gets trickier when negotiating with labels. To avoid the unnecessary confusion to the user, Rhapsody delivers only streamed content. Using an all streamed model, Listen.com can distribute all of its music with no song limits. It’s looking far more attractive now that Rhapsody’s been able to bring in more content beyond independent labels, recently adding heavyweights like EMI, BMG, and Sony Music to its catalog.
Rhapsody wins for usability. It’s compact, easy to understand, and within a minute you can start playing a customized play list, or even send one to a friend. Unlike the competition, there’s no need to download songs first before creating a play list. Simply add the songs you want, and the play list begins streaming. Using an acquired technology from TuneTo.com, 99 percent of the stream for each song is cached to the user’s hard drive. When the user plays the song again, Listen.com only needs to deliver the last one percent of the audio file, which acts like a key unlocking its playability. That feature is attractive to the ISP or broadband provider offering the music, because they can offer high quality streamed audio without constantly delivering the intense bandwidth requirements usually needed. The user likes it because he can get immediate unlimited access to near CD-quality music.
They’re Only on the First Track
All of these applications will change. The delivery of legal digital music must go through many levels of evolution before there’s mass adoption a la Napster. The number one complaint of all these services is their lack of portability, whether it’s burning music to a CD or digital music device. All of the services want to offer portability but they’re just limited because that’s what the labels have given them. Thirty-day time out periods and limits on streaming and downloading are all ways to secure music. The services are desperately locked in a struggle to protect digital rights, something that Napster never chose to consider. At every step, licensing issues get compounded from label to label, to each artist, and to each form of use: streaming, downloading, and portability.
Although it’s complicated for the players involved, success in digital music depends on simplification to the user. At the start of the race, Rhapsody is winning. But there are many more laps to go. Keep listening.