Standards for Personal Jukeboxes

The music industry has sputtered its way into the Internet Age, with technological innovation sidetracked by the battle between major labels and youthful geeks over free music.

Now, two music-loving programmers -- alumni of the company that created the groundbreaking Gnutella file-sharing network -- are trying to chart a path to peace between the labels and the geeks.

Their company, Santa Cruz-based Mediacode Inc., envisions a world of online services that work together to make music more valuable to consumers and more profitable for distributors. By adopting the standards-based approach to the Internet, they argue, the music industry could create online opportunities that encourage programmers to promote the music business, rather than developing ways to steal from it.

“The goal here is to get the Linux hacker community to support the music community,” Chief Executive Robert Lord said, referring to the zealous group of programmers working on an alternative to Microsoft Corp.’s Windows software.

Mediacode has developed an online service to start the ball rolling. Dubbed Muse.Net, it lets people with high-speed Internet connections listen to the music on their computers from any other computer online.

That kind of remote control, which Mediacode also provides for video, isn’t built into any of the popular programs for playing music on a computer. Apple Computer Inc. briefly included a similar feature in its iTunes software, but dropped it after some users adapted the software to enable piracy.

The point of the service is to transform a consumer’s music collection from something physical -- a bunch of songs stored on a machine -- into something virtual -- a set of titles that can be played wherever their owner wants to play them.

That transformation would set the stage for more services that can plug into consumers’ virtual collections, Mediacode Chief Technical Officer Ian C. Rogers said. For example, services could pump songs securely into a collection or help users pick what to play.

One key to Lord and Rogers’ vision is the emergence of standard technologies that enable services to work with each other automatically. That is happening, largely because Microsoft is promoting a set of building blocks for Web services.

Another key is convincing copyright holders to embrace this approach and plug their products into the mix. So far, the labels and Hollywood studios have followed a different muse, distributing music and movies online with electronic locks that don’t work with virtual collections.

As a result, the Muse.Net service can’t handle the locked song files sold by label-sanctioned music distributors such as Roxio Inc.’s Pressplay and FullAudio Corp. The hurdle isn’t the technology, it’s the restrictions imposed by the labels, said Jason Reindorp, group manager for Microsoft’s Windows Digital Media Division.

Some of the labels have started to dip their toes into Web services, however. For example, three of the five major record companies let Ecast Inc. of San Francisco, an online music distributor, obtain song files and related information through standard Web tools, said Lee Shirani, an Ecast vice president.

The Muse.Net software turns a computer connected to the Internet into an online jukebox. Users with multiple computers can use the software to combine scattered song and video files into a single collection that can be played from any Internet-connected PC as well as some hand-held computers.

Unlike file-sharing software, the Muse.Net service -- which Mediacode sells for about $20 a year -- allows only one person at a time to access songs in an online collection. Nor is it designed to copy songs from one machine to another.

Rogers said Mediacode wants to stay in the labels’ good graces, but he added, “We’re not looking to do any big deals at the moment. One way or another, we’re not going to be useful to them or really scary to them until we have critical mass.”

About 150,000 people use Muse.Net, which was released commercially earlier this year.

Ted Cohen, a senior vice president at EMI Group’s EMI Music, has seen Muse.Net and likes it. Unlike file-sharing software, he said, Muse.Net increases consumers’ appreciation of music without decreasing their willingness to pay for it.

“I just think it does all the right things,” he said. “It lets people extend the reach of their music experience without tripping over artists’ rights or content owners’ rights.”

Lord has been immersed in online music since 1993, when he founded the Internet Underground Music Archive while an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz. IUMA gave little-known bands a virtual stage, letting them woo music fans by transmitting free songs through the Internet. Rogers, meanwhile, spent much of the 1990s working with the Beastie Boys’ record label, Grand Royal, a pioneer in using downloadable music to promote bands.

Three years ago, Lord was product manager and Rogers was Webmaster for Nullsoft, a unit of America Online Inc. that developed media and networking technology, when the company released a preliminary version of Gnutella. AOL quickly pulled the plug on that project, and a few months later Lord and Rogers had moved on to other online-media gigs.

They reunited last year, brought together by a common interest in building a “value chain” for digital music out of services that plugged into each other seamlessly. Free-music technologies such as Napster and Kazaa were giving consumers too much, Rogers said, and label-sanctioned subscription services such as Pressplay and MusicNet, owned by RealNetworks Inc. and three major music companies -- Bertelsmann, EMI Group’s EMI Recorded Music and AOL Time Warner Inc.’s Warner Music Group -- weren’t giving them enough.

In effect, Mediacode is attempting to re-create online what the music industry has in the physical world. There, standards for compact discs enable artists, labels, gear manufacturers, distributors and retailers to offer music and players that not only are compatible, but also make each other’s products more valuable to consumers.

In the online world, by contrast, the industry has yet to converge on the standards for making music available to distributors, enforcing the copying and playback rules set by the copyright holders, protecting against piracy, allowing consumers to use the portable music device of their choice, tracking transactions or delivering payments.

Rogers said Mediacode’s approach lets services emerge around digital music one piece at a time. The result, he said, will be “loosely coupled applications that don’t necessarily have to know everything about each other, communicating with each other over a standard language.”

One example is Internet retailing powerhouse Amazon.com Inc., which feeds album-cover art and CD information to Muse.Net and other online services in exchange for linking customers to its music store. “I’ve never talked to anyone at Amazon to get those album covers,” Rogers said, adding, “It really is revolutionary.”

A record label could use the same approach, he said, to feed promotional materials about its artists to anyone who wanted to distribute them. And labels or artists could offer songs in public collections that services such as Muse.Net could plug easily into their customers’ virtual music collections.

Analyst Michael McGuire of GartnerG2, a technology research firm, said the shift advocated by Mediacode requires music executives to give up some of the control they believe they have over songs.

And the Web services approach to security may seem intrusive to some consumers, he said.

“You’re asking me to register what I own,” McGuire said. In Microsoft’s Web services model, he said, the entity that licenses and distributes songs “knows who I am, what I have and what I’m doing with it at all times, theoretically.”