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Life After Napster
By Jay Dougherty
October 7, 2002
Will Internet Users Pay for Music?

For many Internet users, Napster was easy to get along with. Swapping digitized music was as simple as logging on, opening the program, searching for songs or artists, and downloading.

But thanks to a U.S. court ruling last March, Napster is now history. New programs, though, in conjunction with websites, have come along in an attempt to make some history of their own. The challenge: Come up with a business model that will persuade Internet users that music is worth paying for.

There are many music sites out there scrambling for the attention of Internet music fans, but few seem to stand a better chance than most of surviving. Here's a rundown of what you can find:


Napster
www.napster.com

Why search for alternatives to Napster when Napster still exists? The reason is that the "new" Napster differs significantly from the old.

While the Napster service has done its best to preserve the look and feel of the old Napster, users now will have to pay anywhere from $5 to $10 US per month for 50 downloads - plus the ability to swap music with other Napster users.

Napster currently has an estimated 110,000 tracks available, mostly from independent labels. The new Napster is currently in a beta version; the service is expected to become operational in the near future.


Emusic
www.emusic.com

Emusic's claim to fame is that it allows subscribers to download songs in MP3 format. MP3, although very popular as a way of storing music digitally, is not widely supported among music sites that ask you to pay to download songs. That's because MP3 is not officially supported by the recording industry.

Since the recording industry views the MP3 file format as a threat to its existence, music sites that support MP3 will not be able to distribute songs from many of the popular recording artists.

So Emusic doesn't offer many stars - with the exception of Elvis Costello and a few well-known jazz names. What it does have are agreements with some 9,000 independent labels. The site offers a free trial; otherwise, unlimited downloads of MP3 titles cost just under $10 US per month.


PressPlay
www.pressplay.com

Like Emusic, PressPlay offers prospective subscribers a free trial, which is good for 14 days and includes 20 free downloads.

Unlike Emusic, PressPlay has assembled an impressive list of agreements with major music labels, including Sony, Universal, and EMI. That gives PressPlay's subscribers access to such artists as Aerosmith, Santana, Mariah Carey, and many more.

The catch: PressPlay does not offer music in the popular MP3 format. Instead, subscribers download music in a proprietary format and can only continue listening as long as subscriptions are active.


RealOne
www.realone.com

RealOne is based upon the MusicNet partnership sponsored by AOL, Germany's Bertelsmann, Time Warner, and EMI. As with the other pay services, with RealOne, users are expected to pony up just under $10 US per month.

RealOne boasts more than 100,000 titles from popular artists, including Backstreet Boys, Madonna, and Elvis Presley. The service, though, is rough around the edges, and it may be hard to accept for Napster lovers who are used to getting their music for free.

With RealOne, subscribers are in essence "renting" the tracks that they listen to. The basic membership fee gives subscribers a certain number of "credits," with which they can either listen to or download music. Tracks that subscribers download are limited to one PC, a fact that will no doubt anger some. Creating your own CDs from downloaded tracks is also forbidden.


Rhapsody
www.listen.com

Rhapsody, a new music service from listen.com, differentiates itself from sites such as RealOne by offering users unlimited playback of subscribers' favourite songs. After a free seven-day trial, subscribers pay $9.95 US for access to Rhapsody's entire catalogue. Rhapsody offers its subscribers access to lots of radio stations in addition to individual songs. It also makes it simple to switch from exploring exotic radio stations to searching for, and sampling music from artists in virtually any genre.


The Bottom Line

While it's clear that many of the commercial music services online are indeed a little rough and ready, users may well wonder what they offer at all. The answer, the services hope, is a virtual music store on a PC. The front-end programs for all of these services attempt to integrate music listening with the multimedia and informational capabilities of the Internet.

In short, the advantages of these Internet-based music services are obvious when compared to traditional music stores.

So, are you willing to pay?
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