Spinning Tunes on the Web

More than a decade after compact discs dethroned the vinyl LP, a new digital revolution is liberating music from its plastic prison.

Capitalizing on the upheaval caused by MP3, a technology now embraced by tens of millions of Net-savvy consumers, upstart music companies are readying a slew of Web-based services that can push the technology to the next level.

Want to buy an unlimited supply of music for a flat monthly fee? Request virtually any song from a giant Web jukebox? Tune in to a personalized Web broadcast with instant purchasing and delivery of the songs you like?

All of these services are coming. In fact, they’d already be here if not for the music-industry establishment, which is keeping the brake pedal down on new technologies for fear of torpedoing its nearly $40 billion in worldwide sales.

Disdaining MP3 files, which can be easily copied, they’ve adopted a variety of incompatible, encrypted formats that can glue songs to a single computer or memory card. They’ve pressed the makers of portable devices to take the same approach, resulting in a crop of expensive music players that can’t play all of what’s available on the Net.

Still, the revolution is picking up steam, largely because the labels have warmed ever so slowly to technologies they can’t stop.

A key driver in the MP3 phenomenon has been the free “player” software that lets people transform the bulky song files on their CDs into compact MP3 files on their computers--a process better known as “ripping.” These programs also let consumers mix and match tunes from their collection into custom playlists, which a rapidly growing number of music fans are recording onto CDs and trading with friends.

In the latest wrinkle, the players are becoming gateways not just to the music on a user’s computer but also to what’s available on the Internet. For example, RealNetworks’ RealJukebox taps into an Internet database to offer information on each artist in your playlist. It also can download free music to you when you’re online but not tying up your full Internet connection.

MusicMatch of San Diego is going one step further, attempting to learn users’ tastes by watching what music files they play (with permission, of course). Its new jukebox software can not only offer other downloadable songs they might like but also send a personalized stream of music--in effect, a customized online radio station.

Eventually, said Chief Executive Dennis Mudd, people listening to these personalized streams will be able to click their mouse and keep any song they like, provided they pay.

MusicMatch has the technology to do that today, Mudd said, but it hasn’t gotten the licenses it needs from the labels and songwriters. What’s holding up the licenses, he added, is proof that the approach won’t somehow lower profits.

More, more, more

Consumers have clambered onto the MP3 bandwagon not just because they like to make their own playlists but also because so many MP3 files are available for free--often in violation of copyrights. And that’s precisely why so many industry insiders are wary.

Napster, one of the most widely used methods to share MP3s over the Internet, is under legal attack from the major labels and music publishers. Yet it recently found an influential supporter in Bertelsmann, parent of the BMG labels.

If Napster can find a way to satisfy the copyright holders’ demands for compensation, its service could emerge next year as a rich, industry-sanctioned source of downloadable music. But unlike the phenomenally popular Napster of today, the new version won’t be free, and users are likely to face a number of restrictions on the files they download.

Meanwhile, the major labels have begun to give consumers an alternative source of downloadable tunes, hoping to win them over with sound quality and reliability.

The first efforts--offering a few hundred songs and CDs to download, priced at 99 cents to $3.49 per song--haven’t come close to Napster in terms of ease of use, flexibility and selection. Not only do consumers have to download extra software to unscramble the songs, they often aren’t allowed to copy the songs they buy onto more than one computer, a recordable CD or a portable player.

Emusic of Palo Alto is offering a far less restrictive deal, letting consumers download an unlimited number of its MP3s for as little as $10 per month. The price is right for anyone who likes Emusic’s roster of independent-label artists and has a high-speed Internet connection. Otherwise, the selection is limited, and the time spent downloading can be draining.

They call me the seeker

Napster users often say that they’ll go out and buy the CDs to match the songs they download for free. The main appeal of file-sharing, they say, is it lets them try something before spending $13 or more to buy it.

This points to another burgeoning field on the Internet: services that analyze music lovers’ tastes and introduce them to other artists they might like. And once that match is made, the sites will help you spend your money.

Three new players in this field are Gigabeat (https://www.gigabeat.com), Music Buddha (https://www.mubu.com) and MoodLogic (https://www.moodlogic.com). More tools for exploring music are provided by personalized online radio stations, such as TuneTo.com (https://www.tuneto.com), MongoMusic (https://www.mongomusic.com), Launch and MTV affiliate Sonicnet (https://radio.sonicnet.com). Those sites--which transmit streams of music instead of downloading copies of songs to listeners--customize their playlists based on what the listener says about his or her proclivities.

Naturally, you can’t listen to Web radio when you’re not online. To avoid that, personalized digital music service from ClickRadio uses hundreds of songs stored temporarily on your computer.

Users start by loading a free CD filled with encrypted digital files into their computers and specifying the types of music they like to hear. As ClickRadio plays an assortment of songs from the initial stash, users teach the software their preferences by clicking on a thumbs-up, thumbs-down or not-now button. The program stealthily downloads more encrypted music whenever the user goes online, adding new songs to the mix and dropping the ones that got the thumbs-down.

Jukebox hero

Many industry executives envision a day when music fans will be able to play any song they want, at any time. Along those lines, a number of companies are planning massive online jukeboxes that, for a monthly subscription fee, will let users play as many songs as they like.

One of the first such jukeboxes will be from Latin music specialist Eritmo.com (https://www.eritmo.com), which plans to roll out all-you-can-play subscriptions in Puerto Rico later this month. The “Konector” service will mainly stream music to listeners, which won’t allow them to keep copies of the songs on their computers. But Chief Executive Francisco de la Torre said the service will also enable some downloading, along with the ability for users to trade playlists and song recommendations, all for less than $10 a month.

The company’s investors include two of the world’s five largest record labels, and it has already lined up many--but not all--of the licenses it needs from the industry.

One of Eritmo’s investors is Universal Music Group, which recently started trying out a subscription service of its own. The streaming-only service lets subscribers listen to more than 23,000 songs on demand, but they’re all from Universal’s family of labels.

Locked and loaded

With file sizes dropping and computer hard drives expanding dramatically, consumers can easily store 100 CDs’ worth of songs or more on a new PC. The downside is most of their collection is trapped on a single machine.

One alternative is to copy your MP3s into an Internet music locker, which you could dip into from any Internet-connected computer, portable device or Web-friendly appliance. But there’s a price to pay: Getting each CD online can take two hours or more over a dial-up connection.

Locker companies, such as Myplay and MP3.com, could fill your locker instantaneously by dipping into their CD libraries for copies of the music you own. But as MP3.com found out in court, the record labels and music publishers expect to be paid each time a business copies their songs to a customer’s locker.

One competitor, Musicbank, has decided to play nice with the labels and publishers, negotiating deals about fees before launching its service. To recoup those costs, co-founder Michael Downing said, Musicbank will run ads on its service, charge monthly fees for high-quality or wireless audio feeds and collect money from retailers who want to be affiliated.

Musicbank could also become a new distribution method, dropping copies of new CDs into your locker and giving you the choice to buy or delete. Other companies are trying to avoid the fees while also developing ways to make it easier for users to fill their lockers.

HitHive, for example, is negotiating deals with retailers that would automatically put digital copies of the CDs consumers buy into their online HitHive vaults. And Myplay is developing time-saving software that lets users rip MP3s from their CDs and upload them simultaneously.

David Pakman, a co-founder of Myplay, said some music lovers might not be ready to part with the tangible, plastic dimension of music, but young fans are. When Myplay asks college students how big their collections are, he said, “they answer in gigabytes, not in CDs.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The Traditional Process

Band records music

Label produces CDs

Consumer buys CD

The New Way

A band records music, which is then posted on a Web site; the consumer downloads the music

If locked, the consumer must obtain a key

The music now may be copied or shared, depending on encryption

Music files may be copied to:

a portable device

a compact disc

another computer