Will AOL Be The Death Of The Music Industry
- As We Know It?
by Paul McGoldrick
There are two primary sources of paid music downloads on the Internet competing with the free, and unauthorized, services like Kazaa. Napster may no longer be the scourge the industry thought it was but the unauthorized services are doing rather well in terms of just counting downloads.
But at what dollar value does the pirate customer for music agree that it is time to become the legitimate owner of the material on his/her CDs or hard-drive?
The two authorized services are Rhapsody, from Listen.com, and MusicNet. One of the investors in MusicNet is RealNetworks, who have also just bailed Listen.com out of the hole by making an investment in the company - which recently laid off about one-third of its staff. Investing on both sides of the street is not an unknown phenomenon but in this case it will not have endeared RealNetworks to MusicNet's other investors in the form of Bertelsmann, Inc., EMI Recorded Music Holdings, Inc., Warner Music Group Inc. (a division of AOL Time Warner Inc.), and Zomba Recording Corporation.
MusicNet has agreements with all five major record labels and a number of the major independents to supply music material online. Its mission has been to find online music offerings that MusicNet could be integrated into. It has found its first major customer, AOL.
AOL Music has been around for a while but now MusicNet is being added to it with an initial quarter million songs available for download to listen and burn CDs from. There is also a music library management system.
AOL will be offering different levels of the program with, for example, a Premium service allowing for unlimited streaming and downloading plus the ability to burn 10 songs to CD, all for $17.95 per month. The company also plans to add á là carte CD burning per title, recommendation services, and download timers.
With this Premium level the price for burning a track to CD just hit $1.80 each. Sure this is not as cheap as many CDs when you divide the price by the number of tracks: But how many of those CDs are bought solely for one or two tracks that they have? I suspect it is quite a few.
I frankly do not understand how MusicNet prevents a download from becoming a potential burn but whatever the key involved actually is, it is probably not that secure in a world where a lot of very smart people seem to have far too much time on their hands to work these things out.
Nevertheless, $17.95 a month is not a bad amount to pay for access to a huge library of material, which will be growing weekly. Maybe it will mean that the desire to burn CDs will be lessened anyway, and that it will be less tempting to break the system. I don't know - but for a lot of students, who are always pointed out as the worst culprits for piracy, that will reduce the available gas for their vehicle by about 9 gallons a month.
I have often thought that a good way to stop so much college campus access and opportunity to misuse might be to have college networks slow down to 2200 bit/s between 6 PM and 9 AM, but that probably shows how impractical I am. I do strongly suspect the only way for on-campus pirating to stop is for the message to get through that it is theft, and for colleges who have theft committed over their networks to be held as much responsible in court as the user.
MusicNet on AOL may be the end of the road for music industry gouging, changing the overall atmosphere with respect for recording artists, studios and users. It may even end the dissemination of junk tracks along with the good.
But I have one major problem with the whole thing: I would have to join
AOL…