Music Subscription Services Singing Different Tunes

Pressplay and MusicNet, the two new music distribution services owned by major record companies, were designed with the same thought in mind: protecting the industry’s flanks from online pirates.

But the two companies make sharply different assumptions about consumers and what they might want from an online music service.

Judging by their initial versions, MusicNet is mainly a try-before-you-buy tool that promotes CD sales, while Pressplay urges its subscribers to build large collections of digital songs on their PCs.

MusicNet made its debut last week through RealNetworks’ RealOne Music service. Pressplay is expected to launch next week through Yahoo, Roxio and Microsoft’s MSN Music site.

Both services certainly will change and improve over time because they’re built on software. But the folks behind MusicNet and Pressplay have approached the Net from opposite starting points, suggesting a fundamental split in philosophies.

In short, MusicNet is about renting a few dozen songs every month to mix in with your CD collection. But Pressplay is about accumulating songs, which is what music lovers do.

Pressplay also plans to let subscribers make permanent copies of some of the songs they download by recording them onto CDs. In that sense, it’s delivering both a product and a service, while MusicNet is purely a service.

Granted, the average consumer doesn’t build a very large collection, buying less than one CD per month. And some music industry insiders argue that what consumers want from the Net isn’t a bottomless cup of music, but ready access to the 50 or 100 songs they actually listen to.

The basic MusicNet premise is that consumers don’t necessarily want more music for their dollars, they just want a collection that’s continually refreshed. New songs come in for a monthly fee, and old ones flow out.

On the other hand, the phenomenal popularity of Napster and other unauthorized online song-sharing services suggests that consumers would gobble up far more music if it were easy and cheap to do so. Pressplay puts that notion to the test, offering more songs per dollar than CDs do in exchange for a payment every month.

The fate of MusicNet and Pressplay rests in part on these assumptions about consumers, but not entirely. In fact, neither matches up well against the unauthorized free services in several key areas.

Both sell copy-protected songs, most (or all, in MusicNet’s case) of which can’t be moved from a subscriber’s computer.

Neither offers a complete catalog of music. MusicNet offers songs from Warner Music, BMG, EMI and Zomba, while Pressplay features Universal, Sony, EMI and half a dozen independent labels. And each gives consumers little help in discovering new artists they might enjoy.

MusicNet is brought to you by the conglomerates that own three of the five largest record companies--AOL Time Warner, Bertelsmann and EMI Group--and RealNetworks Inc., a pioneer in Internet audio. Pressplay is a joint venture of Universal Music Group and Sony Music, the two biggest record label groups.

Neither MusicNet nor Pressplay sells directly to consumers, offering services instead through other companies’ Web sites. MusicNet, in fact, is little more than a pipeline that delivers copy-protected digital songs to subscribers on request. Its distributors--RealNetworks is the only one today, but America Online plans to offer MusicNet service early next year--are free to enhance and customize the package for subscribers.

By contrast, Pressplay doesn’t allow distributors to alter its service or mingle it with any other programming.

Neither service offers a version yet for Apple computers.

Pressplay hadn’t announced its prices or terms by press time, making it hard to measure how much value it will offer consumers. But it has revealed enough about its plans to distinguish it from Real’s initial MusicNet offering in at least two areas:

* Downloads. Each service gives consumers a monthly allotment of downloads, which copy songs onto the subscriber’s computer, and streams, which play music from an online jukebox. In both cases, the downloaded songs can be played only by subscribers with active accounts.

The basic version of RealOne Music offers consumers 100 downloads and 100 streams for about $10 per month. Each downloaded song can be played for 30 days before the electronic locks slap on, rendering the file unplayable. The locks can be removed with the click of a mouse, granting another 30 days of playability. Each renewal dips into the subscriber’s monthly pot of downloads.

The result is that, for about $120 per year, subscribers can keep a shifting lineup of 100 MusicNet songs active on their computers.

With Pressplay, a downloaded song won’t expire until the user cancels his or her subscription. Each month a subscriber’s collection will grow, making the horde more complete and valuable. In other words, the longer you subscribe, the harder it will be to quit.

One weakness in the Pressplay approach is that it doesn’t let users combine the files they download with the music already on their computers. Andy Schuon, Pressplay’s president and chief executive, said the company didn’t want to let subscribers mix the songs they’d paid for with ones they’d gotten for free from unauthorized online sites.

In the process, though, Pressplay has made its service less attractive to people who’ve converted their CDs to MP3s and other computer music formats.

* Portability. Initially, neither service’s subscribers will be able to copy the music they download onto portable MP3 players. But Schuon said Pressplay subscribers will be able to record a portion of their downloads onto CDs.

That’s a significant shift for the major labels, which haven’t allowed any of their downloadable songs to be “burned” to CD. In fact, at least one major label working with Pressplay hasn’t yet agreed to allow any of its songs to be burned.

Schuon declined to say how many songs could be burned, but he acknowledged that only a portion of the songs available on Pressplay would be recordable.

If Pressplay let consumers make permanent copies of everything they downloaded, then the labels would probably want to collect as much per song as they do for CDs. Otherwise, Pressplay would become a cheaper way to obtain CDs.

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Jon Healey covers the convergence of entertainment and technology. He can be reached at jon.healey @latimes.com.