Online Jukeboxes: Britney but No ‘Boss’

Imagine walking into a candy store where half the bins are empty, and the owner makes you eat everything you buy before you leave.

That’s what it’s like to use the online music services controlled by the major record companies: Pressplay and MusicNet. Representing a new generation of industry-approved, on-demand services, they promise to provide the music you want to hear, when you want to hear it.

But neither has the breadth of music needed to deliver on that promise. And both require you to do most of your listening at your computer.

Granted, their vaults contain lots of songs--about 100,000 each. The selection grows daily. But they don’t come close to matching the selection or portability of the unauthorized free services. Unless and until the courts shut down file-sharing operations such as MusicCity’s Morpheus, those services will continue to set a high standard for the competition to meet.

The problems are not unique to Pressplay and MusicNet. None of the authorized on-demand services, which also include Listen .com’s Rhapsody and Streamwaves, has lined up the licenses needed to cover the entire waterfront of music. And only one, EMusic, lets you move all the music you buy onto CDs and portable devices.

These shortcomings aren’t necessarily fatal flaws, even when the fee is $10 or more a month. The key is to provide more than what consumers can get from other legitimate sources.

To be sure, the first versions of Pressplay and MusicNet offer much more music for the money than CDs and give listeners more control than radio stations do. The trade-off is that both services are narrowly focused on Windows computers, at least initially. And if you don’t spend a lot of time online at your PC, it’s hard to justify spending upward of $120 a year on these services instead of buying eight to 10 CDs.

From Product to Service

Computers and the Internet are changing the nature of the music business, enabling record companies to sell music as a service instead of a plastic product. Ultimately, analysts predict, consumers no longer will fill their shelves with CDs. They will simply buy access to a complete library of songs online, delivered through wires or the airwaves.

Dozens of independent labels have made their catalogs available online at the EMusic site, www .emusic.com, where users can download versions of the companies’ songs for a flat monthly fee. Like the music on CDs, these MP3 files come with no limits on copying or transferring to portable devices.

Aside from EMI, the major record companies have moved gingerly when it comes to online distribution. Instead of the widely used but easily duplicated MP3 format, they have stuck with encrypted formats that can’t be copied freely, moved to portable devices or recorded onto CD.

They also have split into two camps, creating competing online music distributors. The corporate parents of Warner Music, BMG and EMI formed MusicNet with RealNetworks Inc., and Universal Music Group and Sony Music launched Pressplay.

In addition to songs from the catalogs of its three owners, MusicNet distributes music from Zomba Recording, home of teen-pop faves Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys and ‘N Sync. Pressplay, meanwhile, offers music from Universal, Sony and EMI--despite EMI’s stake in rival MusicNet--as well as half a dozen smaller, independent labels.

Neither service, however, has the rights to all the music in its backers’ catalogs. That means no Beatles, Rolling Stones, Garth Brooks or Bruce Springsteen. And some other top artists are represented by only a portion of their work--typically, older albums with minuscule current sales.

Under federal law, an online music service cannot offer songs on demand unless it has struck deals with the labels and the music publishers for the rights to those tracks. Except for EMI, the labels have been slow to grant such licenses, even to one another.

Pressplay and MusicNet representatives say they are determined to get licenses from all the major labels and significant independents. Until they do, however, their lineups are like aging sweaters--too thin to keep you warm. And unless you subscribe, it’s hard to tell whether either service will have the artists and songs you like.

Pressplay made its debut last month on Yahoo, MSN Music and Roxio, each linked from www .pressplay.com. The service on each is the same, as Pressplay doesn’t allow its marketing partners to fiddle with the knobs.

MusicNet, on the other hand, relies on its retailers to shape the look and feel of the service. The first outlet is RealNetworks, which introduced the MusicNet-powered RealOne Music service last month at www.real.com. America Online has started a test run with MusicNet, which it plans to add to its lineup of radio stations and artist promotions.

Streaming With Pressplay

The initial version of Pressplay is heavily weighted toward streaming, or playing songs upon request from an online jukebox. For $9.95 a month, users can make 300 requests from the online jukebox and download 30 songs. Other packages offer 500 streams and 50 downloads for $14.95, 750 streams and 75 downloads for $19.95 and 1,000 streams and 100 downloads for $24.95.

Subscribers must use the Pressplay software, which is based on Microsoft’s Windows Media Player. It’s easy to browse through the collection by genre, search for specific artists, listen to records recommended by Pressplay staff or flip through playlists shared by other users.

If your search comes up empty, the service often will recommend similar artists whose music is available on Pressplay. Although the service doesn’t automatically provide information on the albums or artists it provides, users can call up a review or a biography with a click of the mouse. Those biographies also provide links to related artists, with or without music on Pressplay.

The streaming service, when used with a dial-up modem, is prone to frequent interruptions of songs caused by Internet traffic jams. The problem is less pronounced with a high-speed Internet line, although pregnant pauses remain between each song. Streamed songs also don’t sound as good as downloaded songs because they are compressed more aggressively, particularly when the subscriber is listening through a dial-up modem.

The software makes it fairly simple to create playlists of songs, whether from the Pressplay jukebox, from songs already downloaded or from a mixture of the two. In a mystifying twist, however, the software won’t let you mix Pressplay songs with music from any other source--even your own CD collection.

Subscribers who pay at least $14.95 a month can record some of the songs they download each month. The limit is 20% of the limit on downloading--in other words, someone paying $19.95 for 75 downloads can burn a CD with 15 of those songs. The result is that subscribers pay a bit more for an album’s worth of songs than they would for a new CD at the mall.

Two catches: Not every song on the service can be downloaded, and not every downloadable song can be burned.

Pressplay has tried to make the service fun by adding interviews with artists, message boards and a few goofy extras. Still, the service gives subscribers little help in assembling all the tunes they would like to hear, even though plenty of technology is available to do that. For example, there is no automatic playlist function to generate an hour of tunes based on a specific artist or tempo. Nor can the service register a user’s preferences and suggest music to explore.

Pressplay representatives promise that such improvements are coming soon.

Songs, Video on RealOne

Unlike Pressplay, which is all about music, RealOne is designed to be an amalgam of songs, video clips and multimedia goodies from the Net. The software combines a digital jukebox with a Web browser and video player, all of which can be used simultaneously.

The RealOne Music service lets subscribers play songs on demand or download and keep them for 30 days on their Windows PCs. The service comes in two tiers: $9.95 a month for 100 streams and 100 downloads, or $14.95 for 150 streams and 150 downloads.

Downloaded songs can be mixed with MP3s and other music files that subscribers have on their computers. When it comes to listening to tunes at your computer, RealOne music is indistinguishable from the rest of your collection. Songs can be renewed easily after they expire, with each renewal counting against the monthly limit on downloads.

The problems for RealOne begin as soon as you leave your computer, where all your RealOne songs are confined. Unlike Pressplay, RealOne does not let users duplicate their collections on a second computer, so you can’t enjoy your music both at home and at work. Nor is there any CD burning or support for portable devices.

Beyond that, the initial version of RealOne shares a basic usability flaw with Pressplay: It’s hard to make the most of your allotment of streams and downloads, because RealOne gives little direction in finding artists and songs that fit your tastes.

The service offers no personalization, no software to recommend music based on your likes and dislikes. And the online jukebox won’t play entire sets of songs, which would make it easier to sample a CD or an artist’s albums. Instead, it plays one song and waits for the next request.

Worse yet, if you search for an artist not on RealOne, the service advises you to check your spelling. It should do what every other on-demand service does: acknowledge that the catalog is incomplete and point you to a similar artist whose music is available.

Oh, yes--RealOne offers commercial-free radio stations, but the service itself always opens with a video ad from one of Real’s sponsors. That’s an unwelcome bonus for subscribers paying $9.95 or more a month.

Other Options

There are few other on-demand music services, although several are expected early next year. Among those available today:

* Rhapsody. This combination of online jukebox and commercial-free Internet radio from Listen.com offers subscribers access to two catalogs of music on demand: about 17,500 tracks of classical music from the Naxos labels and more than 22,000 songs from independent rock, pop and hip-hop labels.

The best part of Rhapsody is the free radio service, which offers music in 17 genres, each with multiple subgenres. As songs play, information about the artists and albums appears in the Rhapsody browser, enabling listeners to follow links to other performers and songs they might enjoy. One drawback on a dial-up connection, though, is that the extra downloading can interrupt the music.

For about $6 a month, Rhapsody also provides an on-demand service that lets subscribers store songs in personal online jukeboxes. Subscribers can search for music by artist, song or composer (classical music only), or they can grab them as they are played on one of Rhapsody’s radio stations. Most songs from the nonclassical stations can’t be added to personal collections, however, because Listen.com has not secured the rights.

Listen.com has been negotiating with all the major labels, and it expects to announce deals shortly that could help plug some of the holes in its on-demand offerings.

* Streamwaves. For $13.99 a month, subscribers can play as many songs as they want from an online jukebox. This is a no-frills service: You pick genres in the first column, artists in the second column and songs in the third column, and your playlist appears in the fourth column.

You can’t change the sequence of songs on the playlist, but you can play them in random order. The service doesn’t recommend playlists or songs, and it suggests artists only when you use the search function.

The beauty of the service, at www.streamwaves.com, is that it does what it does well--albeit with temperamental Web-based software. In recent tests, buffering was quick and interruptions were rare, even on a dial-up modem. The selection is limited to artists on EMI labels, but it is wider than what EMI provides to RealOne or Pressplay. You’ll even find some Rolling Stones (but still no Beatles).

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

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The Skinny

Pressplay

Price: $9.95 to $24.95 a month.

The good: Downloaded songs don’t expire, and a portion of the downloads can be recorded onto CD.

The bad: Many big-name acts are missing. Online jukebox performs poorly over a dial-up connection. Relatively few downloads provided, and the downloaded songs can’t be mixed with songs from the subscriber’s collection. No support for portable devices or Macs.

Bottom line: Strictly for music lovers with high-speed connections who spend a lot of time at the computer.

MusicNet/RealOne Music

Price: $9.95 to $14.95 a month.

The good: Full-featured jukebox software with built-in Web browser, automatically integrating RealOne downloads with other music on subscriber’s PC.

The bad: Many big-name acts are missing. Downloads expire after 30 days and can’t be moved to portable devices. Commercials run on start-up. No Mac compatibility.

Bottom line: Good for people who want to refresh their PC’s song lineup with 100 new tunes every month, but not for those trying to build their collection.