Music Unlimited
Subscription services give you legal access to the largest music collections on the planet. And new options are making them more tempting.Eric Hellweg is a writer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Eric Hellweg
Illustration by Eboy
For digital music lovers, there's another option besides outright purchase and outright theft. Subscription-based services permit music fans, for a fee of less than $10 per month, to rent all the digital tunes they could want.
With all the new choices in services--including ones operated by Musicmatch, Napster, Real, and Virgin--we decided to evaluate them more closely. Each service lets you access its entire music library at any time, as if it were a gigantic jukebox. In many instances, the songs stream to your PC as you listen, so you don't have to download an entire song before playing it.
Many people listen to music on the go, so you might think that streaming is sometimes less desirable than downloading. After all, you can listen to streaming music only while at or near a PC with an Internet connection. To deal with this limitation, some services give their customers the option of downloading songs to their PC's hard drive for later use.
These downloadable tracks differ in important and basic ways from what you get if you buy them outright. The downloads from subscription services incorporate digital rights management (or DRM) technology to limit what you can do with your music. For instance, a DRM-protected song may be set up to prevent you from burning it to a CD; in contrast, a typical track purchased from the ITunes Music Store (for example) carries no such restrictions.
On some music services, downloadable files are just a convenience. On others (such as Virgin Digital), the service may not always let you stream an entire song; in those cases, you'll have to download the protected files if you want to hear the song in its entirety.
DRM permits music rental services to expire songs when a customer's subscription lapses. Until recently, this ability to control the way you used a song was possible only on a desktop PC. But a new DRM technology, called Janus, will be able to untether these restricted files from a PC so you can play them on portable music players. (For more information, see "Subscription Portability: Can You Take It With You?") To play music encapsulated in Janus DRM, you must have a new, Janus-compatible player.
Selection Is Key
The biggest advantage of streaming music is the selection. If you prefer an unlimited musical buffet to à la carte paid downloads, it's hard to beat streaming services. Each competing service provides hundreds of thousands of tracks that subscribers can play almost instantaneously.
Despite promises of huge numbers of songs available on the various services, odd catalog omissions crop up on occasion. Representatives from several of the companies say that holes in a service's library might reflect the lack of a license to present songs or albums in a particular format. Each record company requires services to sign unique license agreements in order to do different things with the music; a service that has a license to sell a song might not be able to stream it, for example.
Consider Neil Young's early seven-track album Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. When we checked, Napster and Virgin Digital had all seven songs on the album available for download, but only Napster let us stream every track in its entirety (Virgin limited us to playing a 30-second streamed preview). Rhapsody offered only six of the album's songs and Musicmatch four. Ideally, a service would let you stream the entire song or download a DRM-encased version of any track available in its library. And the library shouldn't have maddening gaps in the playlists of popular artists.
Though such discrepancies don't nullify the value that these music services provide, prospective subscribers should be aware of them. A service with 800,000 streamed songs in its database might not have the very one you want to hear.
Musicmatch On Demand
The clean and uncluttered interface of Musicmatch On Demand integrates with its Jukebox player, which makes navigating through albums and single tracks easy.
Once you've added the On Demand service to Jukebox, you can drag and drop songs from a search panel into Jukebox's playlist window. One useful option lets you create playlists that mix and match tracks on your hard drive with streaming tracks.
If you're in a musical rut, Musicmatch can recommend new tunes: Select ten bands or artists you like (or let Jukebox inventory the music files on your PC), and the Music Discovery Engine will volunteer dozens of recommendations based on cues from the music-listening habits of all its users.
Napster
The first time around, watching the Napster client locate music is as thrilling as it was when Napster was an illicit service. But the thrill departs quickly. Of the services we tested, Napster's ultimately disappointed us the most.
Searching Napster by song title or artist delivers a lot of results, but other search options turn out to be frustratingly limited.
The client's cluttered and inconsistent interface makes it hard to tell, for instance, whether you'll hear the full song or just a 30-second sample when you click a title.
Napster touts its ability to search and play other members' playlists, but the interface has too few options: You can search only by the overly broad "genre" categories; or you can browse other users' playlists--if you know their name. But unless you figure out by ESP that "pookie2783" shares your tastes in music, this feature is pretty useless.
Most annoying was the pause--a result of the service's buffering the stream--that ensued after we clicked a song title. We had to wait several seconds for some songs to play. All in all, Napster reborn is only a shadow of its former self.
Rhapsody
With over 800,000 songs to choose from, clear organization, and links to a wide range of bonus content (including music videos), Rhapsody fared the best of the four services we tested. It isn't the cheapest service (Musicmatch offers subscriptions at rates as low as $7.95 per month, if you commit to a full year of service); but its sound quality is excellent, it offers desirable bonus features, and we didn't encounter any major faults.
Fetch and organize your streamed and downloaded songs the way you like, using Rhapsody's flexible user interface.
Despite its association with Real, Rhapsody doesn't require its subscribers to use Real's RealPlayer application. Instead, subscribers simply download the Rhapsody player, whose elegant user interface we prefer to RealPlayer's.
Unlike some of the other services, Rhapsody introduces remarkably little lag between the time when you click the play button and the time when the song starts to play. Rhapsody's responsiveness makes the experience of listening to streaming music about as close as you can get to playing a song file that's on your PC's hard drive.
Rhapsody offers other innovative features for subscribers, too. Music fanatics can use the application's blog link to share playlists and to post comments about them.
Virgin Digital
Richard Branson's foray into streaming music, Virgin Digital promises a track count in the seven-figure range, more than any other service offers.
Virgin's streaming content comes from MusicNet, which also delivers content to competitors MusicNet@AOL and FYE. A sizable portion of the library permits streaming, but some of the tracks stream only 30-second preview segments. In those instances, you have to download the song before you can listen to it.
Virgin Digital has a somewhat perplexing user interface that, for instance, makes a distinction between "albums" and "works."
The downloaded music that you get as part of the subscription comes in Windows Media Audio, DRM-protected, format. The license permits you only to play tracks on your PC (as often as you like) for 30 days after the download.
Some of the music in Virgin's library has to be purchased separately, above and beyond the subscription fee; you can play the songs on most portable players, and you can burn them to CDs if you like.
We found Virgin's user interface rather byzantine, and its instructions were spartan: It took us a while to get used to how the app lists song data.
We had surprisingly little difficulty finding gaps in Virgin's vaunted million-song library. Unsuccessful searches yielded this brief response: "We looked and couldn't find anything. Sorry." At least the message was polite.
And although you can drill down through an artist's album list to individual songs, you can't drill up, so to speak, to browse the full list of every band or to count the available songs in any of Virgin's 19 top-level genre categories.
Features Comparison
|
|||||
Musicmatch On Demand |
$9.95 per month |
Over 800,000 songs |
Good |
7 days |
E-mail your playlists to anyone; Music Discovery Engine makes good guesses about music you'll like. |
Napster |
$9.95 per month |
Over 700,000 songs |
Fair |
7 days |
Peek into other members' playlists or share your own; see what other members are playing in real time; communicate via message boards. |
Rhapsody |
$9.95 per month |
Over 800,000 songs |
Good |
14 days |
Blog your playlists and comment on others'; Share your playlist or browse and listen to others' playlists; e-mail your playlists to anyone. |
Virgin Digital
|
$7.99 per month |
Over 1,000,000 songs |
Good |
14 days |
Stream most of the library or download protected files; some songs are download-only and cost a dollar each beyond subscription fees. |
Subscription Portability: Can You Take It With You?
Illustration by Eboy
Thanks mostly to a Microsoft-developed technology called Janus, you will soon be able to drag and drop any number of your favorite songs from a subscription service to a portable player. Your music will no longer be trapped in that boat anchor of a PC of yours, chaining your tunes to your desk.
Not all services plan to use Janus, however. Most notably, Microsoft competitor Real Networks intends to go its own way, promising to release its own home-brewed flavor of some kind of device portability in 2005. For their part, Musicmatch and Virgin Digital each expect to unveil Janus-based portability options this year. (For more about these new services, see Eric Dahl's Playlist column, "Unlimited Music Downloads for $15 per Month.")
Only one service, the FYE Download Zone, offers a final version of a Janus-based portability program. Napster's "preview" release of its own client software can't transfer songs to a Janus-compatible portable player--users must do that through Windows Media Player.
Both FYE and Napster charge $14.95 per month for Janus downloads, compared with $9.95 per month for a standard subscription. But for that extra $5 per month, you get to carry an amount of music that is limited only by the storage capacity of your portable player. Theoretically, with a big enough player, you could tote 800,000 songs wherever you go. The only tether is a monthly check-in, during which you dock your portable player to an Internet-enabled computer and permit the service to renew the licenses. If you cancel your subscription to the music service or let it lapse, you won't be stuck with unplayable songs: They delete themselves from the player.
For the moment, the biggest problem is finding an audio player that supports Janus. At press time, only five players offered Janus support, but that number is expected to grow considerably in early 2005, when manufacturers start shipping new models.
Tunes Gratis: Radio Free Internet
It's hard to dispute the financial value of gaining access to nearly a million songs for less than $10 per month, but you can get digital music legally for free. The one-and-a-half-year-old Mercora Web service enables its members to listen to music files streamed from other members' hard drives, a hybrid of peer-to-peer and streaming. And Shoutcast, a radio-like service owned by AOL (PC World is an AOL content partner), offers thousands of different streams, some taken from actual broadcast radio stations.
As with the for-pay streaming services, you can't keep the music you hear through Mercora or Shoutcast. The "stations" on each service must pay public performance royalties for the right to provide commercial music streams--the same fees radio stations pay. Shoutcasters can sell ad time just the way radio broadcasters do. Mercora runs Google text ads alongside search results to bring in a little money; but unlike some peer-to-peer apps, Mercora doesn't deluge your system with adware programs.
To hear Shoutcast streams, you simply visit Shoutcast.com and select one of the thousands of streams available, if your music player software supports Shoutcast (most types do). Streams come from individual DJs (people who designate their computers as servers) and from radio stations that use Shoutcast to widen their audience.
Mercora turns your music library into a 24-hour Internet radio station.
Mercora operates a little differently. After you install the client and register for the service, Mercora searches your hard drive for music files it can stream. At the same time, you can search for artists or songs, tune in to others' streams, and chat or play online games with other Mercora users. And it's no coincidence that Mercora's client resembles an instant messenger client. It's a very sociable, personal music service.
Like Napster in its early days, Mercora has a thriving community feel to it. If you find people whose playlists you like, you can add them to a favorites list. But unlike the early Napster, Mercora needs more people (and their music) to populate the service. Both Mercora and Shoutcast offer a viable alternative to fee-based streaming services. Unfortunately, even though you can tune in to dozens of different genres of music, Mercora and Shoutcast have the same drawback as radio: You can't pick the song you want to hear.