Digital Noise: Music and Tech

Hear that popping sound? It's the sound of executives in the music and movie industries taking an extra dose of heart medicine. Wednesday, a new site called Zookz began public beta-testing a service that will let users download an unlimited number of MP3 music files for a single monthly fee of $9.95. Users can also download an unlimited number of MP4 movies for the same price, or both music and movies for $17.95 per month. Those are unprotected, DRM-free downloads that can be transferred to any device or shared an unlimited number of times.

Of course there are a few catches. Currently, the site only has about 50,000 tracks--a paltry selection compared with iTunes, Amazon MP3, and other services, although the company promises to add 5,000 tracks per week. In its current early beta state, there's no browsing among titles--you have to search, which requires you to know exactly what you want, and then hope it's in the (currently tiny) Zookz database. (I didn't test it for movies, as the focus of this blog--and my main personal interest--is music, but the selection's even smaller there: only 1,500 titles.)

How can Zookz possibly get away with this when the only other subscription music-download service I know of, eMusic, charges more for a limited number of monthly downloads? Simple. According to its FAQ, Zookz is based in the Caribbean nation of Antigua, and isn't subject to U.S. jurisdiction, including copyright law. The company claims it's operating in line with a 2007 World Trade Organization agreement between Antigua and the U.S., a claim I have absolutely no qualifications to evaluate one way or the other.

If you're willing to trust Zookz with your credit card information, you can fill your hard drive and all your portable music players with music for a very, very low price. Get it while it lasts....

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Music subscription service eMusic has always puzzled me. While it was the first site to offer DRM-free downloads, I never downloaded enough music to justify paying even the lowest subscription rate. The fact that it makes you navigate a long sign-up screen and enter a credit card number before showing you the song selection and other features of the site--even if you just want a free trial--drives me nuts. But despite my skepticism, the site has some big fans among voracious consumers of indie music.

Judging from the angry comments on the site's message board, some of those fans are up in arms. The company announced a deal Monday with major label Sony to add catalog tracks--that is, music released more than two years ago--from Sony artists. But eMusic barely mentioned the fact that it's raising prices at the same time. Specifically:

The lowest-priced Basic subscription ($11.99) now offers only 24 tracks per month (50 cents per track) instead of 30 (40 cents per track). Existing customers will be grandfathered into the old 30-song allotment, according to an eMusic spokesperson cited by the Los Angeles Times.

The mid-tier Plus subscription goes from $14.99 to $15.89 and offers only 35 tracks (45 cents per track) instead of 50 (30 cents per track).

The high-end Premium subscription goes from $19.99 to $20.79 per month and offers only 50 tracks (42 cents per track) instead of 75 (27 cents per track).

Subscribers may be angry, but they shouldn't be surprised. eMusic has periodically raised prices since introducing an all-you-can eat download plan for $10 a month back in 2000. Just look at the prices in CNET's review from 2004 (updated in 2006), and you'll notice that the company has cut download allotments almost in half since the review was written.

Subscription-based music is still an experiment. The royalty structure of the music business was set up to sell individual physical recordings. It's easier to translate that business model to individual downloads than it is to subscriptions. Still, raising prices during the worst economy in more than 50 years doesn't strike me as the best idea.

What really seems to be throwing eMusic fans off, however, is the timing: fair or not, they're blaming the Sony deal for the price increase. Most eMusic fans I've heard from are real music nuts, and are there to sample a wide range of music from relatively unknown cutting-edge acts, not to download music they could find anywhere. Imagine the clerks in High Fidelity suddenly being told that their favorite mail-order distributor is raising prices, but in exchange will now let them order ABBA and Chili Peppers records just like the chain stores in the mall.

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eMusic users awoke Friday to a redesign of the subscription-based download site, which specializes in music from independent artists. The main feature is a recommendation engine provided by MediaUnbound, which uses a combination of computer algorithms and real live music fans to duplicate the services of that one friend of yours who always seems to know about the new bands first. MediaUnbound CEO Michael Papish had this funny exchange with TechCrunch in which he explained why his company's technology is better than Pandora and other recommendation engines, although the TechCrunch reviewer remained unconvinced.

It sounds intriguing, and I'm sure that eMusic's 400,000-plus users will enjoy playing with it. But every time I think to check the service out, I'm stymied by its sign-up process. The front page is useless, offering almost no insight into what eMusic offers. It's very hard to browse or search to see what songs are on the service, much less sample them--the only way I could get to the store was by clicking on the "Audiobooks" link at the bottom of the page, then selecting the "Browse" tab. You can't test the new recommendation engine. This page listing reasons to join just doesn't do the trick. Neither does this page listing a handful of free samples, seemingly chosen at random.

This aggressive approach to getting sign-ups may have been OK when free music was hard to come by and when iTunes and other music stores trafficked only in DRM-encrusted files. But with sites like Imeem offering free streaming of entire songs, and Amazon.com letting you search among millions of MP3 tracks from major labels as well as indies, the redirects to the sign-up screen are a real turn-off. I don't understand why eMusic doesn't just make the sample version of the store the front page, then guide users to the sign-up page when they try to download something--just like Amazon or any other Web-based music store.

Repeat after me: it's just a rumor. Record company sources deny it. But if the anonymous tipster who e-mailed Mac Daily News is telling the truth, and Apple is indeed going to offer an all-you-can-download iTunes subscription service for for $129.99 a year (or $179.99 a year with Mobile Me), other subscription services will have a hard time surviving.

Let's review for a moment, shall we?

eMusic.
Cost? The cheapest plan $143.88 per year, but only for 30 downloads per month. No unlimited plan available.
Works with the iPod? Yes, because the downloads are non-DRM-protected MP3s.
Chance of survival? Only with price cuts and a more generous subscription plan.

Zune Pass.
Cost? $179.88 per year.
Works with iPod? No.
Chance of survival? Yes, but only because Microsoft seems committed to losing money on the Zune for as long as it takes to make a dent in Apple's market share, and will probably follow with a price cut.

Rhapsody to Go.
Cost? $179.88 per year.
Works with iPod? No.
Chance of survival? Slim. Subscription-music fans tend to like Rhapsody, but once there's an alternative that costs less and works with the most popular MP3 player in the world, I imagine a lot of those fans will reconsider.

Napster to Go.
Cost? $179.40 per year.
Works with iPod? No.
Chance of survival? Given all the other problems Napster's already facing, an iTunes subscription service could be the last straw.

It's sometimes lost in all the flavor-of-the-week mix-remix-download-social networking sites, but eMusic has been selling DRM-free MP3s--meaning they can be played on the iPod or any other player--from independent labels and artists for a decade now, and has a reasonable claim to be the No. 2 music store behind iTunes.

A planned redesign is meant to help eMusic retain this position. According to reports in Fortune and Digital Music News, the site's slated for an overhaul beginning next week. Artist pages will be updated with Wikipedia biographies, original editorial content, and embedded YouTube videos. In a nod to Web 2.0, fans will be able to embed portions of these artist profiles, including streaming song samples, in their Facebook pages, as well as on other social-recommendation sites such as Digg. A navigational update is also in the works--for such a well-established site, eMusic is kind of hard to get around.

One thing they're not getting rid of: the subscription-based purchasing model. That's always been a deal-breaker for me, as I simply don't download 30 songs from independent artists and labels per month. Still, if you're a voracious consumer of new music, and prefer legal downloads to file-sharing or buying physical recordings, eMusic remains an excellent choice.

I've written about CD Baby before. It's a great way for independent musicians to sell their recordings.

For a one-time fee of $35 per album, it will set up both mail-order distribution (for which it takes $4 per CD) and digital distribution through all the major music stores, including iTunes (for which it takes 9 percent of what the store gives its artists, which is usually about 60 percent of the list price).

A couple days ago, CD Baby began offering direct downloads from its site. According to an e-mail I got from a representative, CD Baby takes only 9 percent of the list price--its standard cut for all digital downloads. But there's no other party involved, which means that the artist gets to keep 91 percent of the revenue from sales through the site.

As with physical CD sales, the artist gets to set the price. Downloads are unprotected MP3s, lacking digital rights management (DRM) technology, which means that they'll play on any computer or portable device. iTunes still offers better exposure--direct integration into the software used by more than 100 million iPods--but this puts CD Baby into the same space as eMusic, which recently surpassed 100 million downloads.

eMusic works with independent labels, so its artists are probably more prominent than those on CD Baby--musicians on indie labels might get some radio play on college radio and perhaps national press coverage, while unsigned bands almost never do.

Nonetheless, if you're interested in a broad array of music and like to support artists (particularly favorite local acts) well before anybody else has discovered them, CD Baby is a great place to start.