MusicNow? Not Yet.
Subscribe to The Post By Rob Pegoraro
Sunday, April 13, 2003; Page H07
Buying music on the Internet isn't as easy as you think. You can order a CD with one-click efficiency -- but if you want to download a song instead of waiting for a plastic disc to arrive in the mail, you'll face a maze of fine-print restrictions, enforced by proprietary, sometimes buggy software.
This problem can't be blamed on technology. Tools to compress a song into an easily transferred file have existed for years, and millions of people use them every day.
But they're not paying for their downloads, nor have they been given any easy way to do so, even though online sales are also old hat.
The recording industry's ventures into digital-music sales, with one exception (Vivendi Universal's MP3-only, minor-label outlet EMusic), have consistently failed to heed the lessons of such file-sharing systems as Napster and Kazaa: People want downloads they can use as they see fit.
MusicNow, launched March 26 by Chicago-based FullAudio, could have learned from such predecessors as Listen.com, MusicNet and Pressplay. Instead, it compounds their errors.
MusicNow (www.musicnow.com) offers a $4.95-a-month plan that consists of souped-up Internet radio and a $9.95-a-month option that adds unlimited music streams, "conditional downloads" and the ability to buy "permanent downloads" at 99 cents each for copying to music players and CDs.
That two-tiered structure lends this service, which lives inside Microsoft's Windows Media Player 9 (for Win 98 SE or newer), a split personality.
Its radio half, done up as a series of channels, looks slick but doesn't offer a lot over existing Web radio, much of which remains free. Its sole advantages are the lack of ads, the option to skip past a song and its display of what artist is next on the playlist.
MusicNow's downloading is much less remarkable. Both conditional and permanent transfers are offered as Windows Media Audio files, encoded at a good-but-not-great bit rate of 128 kilobits per second. You can search for music by artist, album title or song title, then stream it, obtain it in conditional form or buy it outright. (The two kinds of downloads are indistinguishable in Windows without inspecting file-properties windows.) Conditional downloads can only be played on a PC signed in to a MusicNow account, and you must also go online periodically to renew the songs' licenses.
Permanent downloads are touted as yours to keep but aren't quite: Each one can only be burned to CD twice and transferred to three portable players. And it remains in Windows Media Audio format, incompatible with a lot of digital-music hardware.
Most damning of all, these limits mean purchased tracks will not stay purchased. I burned three songs to a CD Thursday morning, but when I tried to burn them to a second CD that night, MusicNow's software asked me to cough up another 99 cents each.
Tech support, accessible only via e-mail, replied Friday that it had "reissued the licenses to these tracks"; a spokesman later said the buy-these-songs-again message shouldn't have appeared until my third copy to CD, but the damage was done.
This behavior is unacceptable in any kind of sales transaction. The nation's foremost foe of Internet piracy, Motion Picture Association of America President Jack Valenti, has put it best: "If you cannot protect what you own, you don't own anything."
You can easily evade these restrictions by burning a permanent download to CD and then copying it back to your computer in MP3 format -- but why should you have to? Don't the record labels insisting on this know they're only annoying potential customers?
MusicNow's malfunctions might be forgivable if it offered better access to music, but it doesn't. Despite having signed up all five major record labels, the service's irritatingly erratic catalogue leaves out many artists big and small. As with other music services, this isn't all MusicNow's fault; some artists refuse to sell their work online, and others are still arranging for that.
AI
