For Rent: Sign of Times at Online Subscription Music Services
Music lovers have traditionally measured their ardor in units of plastic, as in, “I’ve got 50 live Dead tapes!” or “I need another bookcase for my CDs!”
That’s because music is something people collect, as opposed to using and discarding. But soon a host of companies will try to persuade consumers to rent songs, not own them.
A new breed of subscription music service is coming to Internet-connected computers as early as this summer, offered by such companies as Streamwaves, FullAudio, MusicMatch, Napster, RealNetworks, Yahoo and America Online. The common feature of all these services is that consumers have to keep paying to keep listening to the music they like.
The come-on for music fans is having access to more songs for less than it would cost to buy them all on CD. But it’s not clear that consumers are ready to add music to the stack of monthly bills they receive for entertainment and information services.
“It is primarily an industry-driven phenomenon,” said analyst P.J. McNealy of the Gartner research and consulting firm. “They’re trying to create a continuing revenue stream, month over month, and a continuing relationship with the consumer, to be able to market to them.”
An early entry into the field came last year when MP3.com launched its classical and children’s music subscriptions.
The next wave of subscription services will come in two basic flavors: ones that enable users to listen to songs from an online jukebox and ones that let users download (copy) songs from an online music warehouse. One variation in the works from companies such as Napster, Centerspan and Wippit are services that let users make authorized copies of songs from one another’s computers, although Wippit and Centerspan won’t necessarily stop ex-subscribers from listening to the songs they downloaded.
No prices for the services have been announced, but the fees being considered range from $5 to $15 per month.
The advantage of the download services is that users don’t have to be online to listen to the music provided. The disadvantage is the time it takes to acquire music--10 to 20 minutes per song on a dial-up connection.
No matter what the flavor, the new services all face the same challenge: gaining permission from labels, publishers and artists to offer a sizable number of songs. None of the services is likely to start with the comprehensive catalog that Napster made available at its peak, before a federal court ordered it to crack down on piracy. In fact, none is likely to come close, mainly because of the industry’s slow pace in authorizing music for subscription services.
Streamwaves, an online jukebox service, tries to get around the problem by gathering at least half of what’s available in specific genres. It’s starting with Christian music and a service dubbed HigherWaves, which Chief Executive Jeff Tribble hopes to launch by the end of June.
The test version of HigherWaves lets subscribers create playlists by browsing through menus of musical styles, artists, albums and songs. To save time and try out unfamiliar artists, subscribers can pick a song or two and have the program automatically build a two-hour playlist around the song or songs.
The software works much like a multiple CD player, allowing users to play songs in random order, skip forward or back or pause. As with any online jukebox, though, the experience is better with a high-speed Internet connection than with a dial-up modem.
James Glicker, president of music services for FullAudio, said online jukebox services will have trouble keeping their prices low enough to attract subscribers. His company’s subscribers will download songs to their computers and play them offline, avoiding the cost and the sonic vagaries of streaming music over the Net.
The service, which is also in field tests, will let subscribers download a limited number of hits and older songs from popular acts--100 or more, depending on the monthly fee--along with unlimited songs from up-and-coming bands. At the end of each month, subscribers would need to download a new electronic key for any song they wanted to keep playing or else it would go mute.
The downloads go on in the background, pausing whenever subscribers log off the Internet and resuming when they log on again, Glicker said. The initial version allows searches by genre, artist and song, and future versions also will be able to recommend songs based on preferences.
Unlike a jukebox service, FullAudio lets subscribers mix the tunes they’ve rented with the rest of the songs on their computers. It also lets them move songs to any portable device that has Microsoft’s copyright-protection technology, but only twice per song, Glicker said.
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Times staff writer Jon Healey covers the convergence of entertainment and technology.
