Farmclub.com's Music Service: Get Ready to Rock

The music download revolution, spurred by Napster and its 38 million users, has forced record companies to rethink how people want to get their music. Some companies, such as Bertelsmann Music Group, appear to be betting on downloads; BMG struck a deal with Napster to create a subscription-based download service. But other forward-thinkers are looking to streaming technology as the answer.

In May, MP3.com started its own subscription classical music channel, priced at $9.95 a month. Streamwaves announced on Monday a deal with EMI Music to license a portion of its music catalog for on-demand streaming. And Farmclub (www.farmclub.com), a subsidiary of Universal Music Group (UMG), is now beta testing an on-demand streaming service.

Farmclub's subscription streaming service lets you listen to any of about 25,000 songs anytime you want, in any order. You can listen to entire albums, or create your own playlists. (Get in on the trial at www.farmclub.com/subscription/beta.html.)

A subscription-based streaming music service theoretically answers the recording industry's greatest fear about digital music distribution: Since the files never reside on the listener's hard drive, the threat of piracy is greatly reduced. At the same time, however, it's less than ideal for users, since streaming technology relies upon a persistent Internet connection, precluding access in the car or from a portable player (broadband, always-on wireless access may well eliminate this shortcoming, though not in the immediate future.) Downloaded MP3s, legal or not, allow a greater degree of flexibility for the user.

Still, Farmclub has taken the first step in exploring streaming as a conduit for secure music delivery. Judging by our first look at the beta service, this could be a step in the right direction.

Start Me Up

To sign up for Farmclub's service, you register your name and location; fill out a questionnaire that covers your musical tastes, Web use patterns, and buying habits; how many CDs you own and how many you have bought in the last six months. UMG then tracks everything you listen to. If providing personal information and being tracked for commercial purposes makes you uneasy, you may want to think twice before signing up. But at least the company is straight up about what it's doing. The service agreement states: "We will … maintain and have access to information about you, including but not limited to, order information, biographical information, information about playlists you create, information about the musical tracks you choose to play and other data."

Additionally, the service agreement clears up any possible misunderstandings about your rights to the stream coming your way: You can listen to it, but you can't save it, make copies of it or reverse-engineer it.

After you log in with your user name and password (you select these during registration), the service launches a player. If you use OnAir (formerly www.com) to listen to streaming Net radio, the player will seem very familiar -- it's licensed from OnAir. The top part of the window displays the artist, song title and album name; bandwidth selection; and play, pause, forward, rewind and stop buttons.

The lower portion of the window includes easy-to-navigate tabs for search, playlists, help and tools. You can search by artist name, song title or album name, or you can browse alphabetically by artist or by one of the 19 genres, including rock, hip-hop and world.

If you're not sure who you want to listen to, browsing is the way to go. Otherwise, searching by artist returns every song that is available through the service. You then select which song you want to hear or add it to a playlist, which makes it easy to listen to it later. The artist name and album name are hyperlinked; if you click the artist's name, you'll get a list of the albums available. If you click the album, you get a list of all the tracks available, as well as an option to play the entire album.

Navigating back once you've drilled down to the song level can be annoying. Each screen features a back button at the end of the song list; to get to the end you often have to scroll for a while. Adding a back button at the top and bottom would make it much easier to move around.

Creating a playlist makes it much easier to get to your favorite selections than repeating the multi-step search process. You can create up to 20 playlists, which are stored under the playlists tab for easy access.

Let The Music Play

How you find the music is certainly important, but it's worthless if you don't like what you find. Selection is the true beauty of a service like this. UMG is one of the big five record labels, which means it can offer recordings from a substantial number of artists. Albums by U2, Jay-Z and Godsmack (all top 10 albums in November) are available, as are classics from John Coltrane, Stevie Wonder, Bob Marley - hell, even John Tesh is here. The real draw for me was being able to listen to albums I had heard about but never felt like actually buying.

Sound quality is another priority. Farmclub does a pretty good job offering different bit rates to conform to different connection bandwidths, with 20Kbps, 40Kbps and 64Kbps streams. The low and medium streams do sound tinny, as you'd expect, but the high-bandwidth streams sound very good, with full stereo sound. It's nowhere near CD-quality, but it is comparable to listening to an FM radio station.

Although Farmclub seems to understand the need for good sound quality, it misses out on several other Net extras. Specifically, the service doesn't provide any additional artist information, and no reviews or background on the groups were available -- just a "Buy this CD" link in the player.

But even with its few drawbacks, Farmclub's subscription service has the potential to satisfy. When widespread, reliable wireless Internet access for portable devices is available, this kind of service will be very compelling, and many users will likely be willing to pay a reasonable fee for subscription. In the meantime, however, price will be a sticking point. Farmclub will not say what it's planning to charge once the service is officially launched, but it has been reported that a monthly fee of $15 is being floated. This seems a bit steep for access to a single label's collection via a networked computer, but the market will decide. We're all ears!