All You Need is Ears: Music on the Internet

by Edward B. Driscoll, Jr.
Winter 2003/Spring 2004

A few years ago, Web-based music was a bit like the Wild West: hundreds-maybe thousands of Internet radio services were the very definition of narrowcasting: if you were a fan of the greatest hits of East Germany in 1975, chances are, you could find an Internet radio station that was playing them. The ability to access a diverse range of music as never before-and much of it free-was a killer app for building up a nationwide base of broadband users.

If you wanted to download music, it may or may not have been legal, but by simply loading the Napster program onto your PC, and going online, you were good to go. Thousands of other people were also online, and file sharing was a breeze.

Then a few years ago, the regulatory environment began to change. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the government created a public relations nightmare for themselves by threatening users of peer-to-peer networks.

So what happened for the music listener on the Internet?

Internet Radio: Once Down, Now Making A Comeback
Let's look first at Internet radio. In just a couple of years time, it's gone from a wide-open format essentially available to anyone with a Web server and a love of music, to an industry tightly controlled and regulated by the US government, which has imposed both a royalty and reporting structure. That has wiped out numerous small players who each once narrowcasted unique niches of music to a few hundred or a few thousand hard-core listeners.

Fortunately though, the US appears to be trying to swing the equilibrium somewhat in the opposite direction, to make Internet radio more affordable to potential small players.

Ryan Jones, senior analyst of the media and entertainment strategies division of the Yankee Group, a Boston-based technology consulting firm says, "Couple all of that with that fact that consumers outside of the workplace environment really don't want to be around their PC when they're listening to music. They want to either do it in their living room where the stereo is, or they want to make it portable. So the status quo of Internet radio has been a lot of consolidation."

However, while the field has been narrowed somewhat, there are still lots of choices for the listener. Big players include radio.netscape.com (formally Spinner.com), one of the earliest Internet radio startups, Real Audio's radio.real.com, and Yahoo's Launch.com.

"As far as midsized players go," Brad Hill, the author of The Digital Songstream (published by Routledge), says, "I'm crossing fingers on behalf of Live365.com and shoutcast.com, the sites that aggregate the small streamers, and give them a platform on which to operate. The value there is that it keeps small operators alive, because they are riding on the backs of mid-sized enablers.

Straddling the Fence
Then there is a service like Listen.com, which straddles Internet radio and the ability download individual songs. For $9.95 a month, the listener can download an unlimited number of songs into his client program, which Listen.com dubbed Rhapsody. Pat Hurley, the co-author of Smart Homes For Dummies (published by John Wiley & Sons) says that Listen.com has an enormous range of music and artists, "although there are some holes that will drive you crazy: if you like the Rolling Stones, you won't get any Rolling Stones' records." Additionally, there are also plenty of Internet radio stations to chose from on Listen.com, and the Internet radio feature is available separately for half of Listen's $9.95 fee.

That fee is strictly for playing from Rhapsody: "you can play a song a hundred times, but it is not portable: you cannot take it onto your MP3 player or burn a CD of it", Hurley says. "But they also have a per-unit price, where you can make something portable and put it on an MP3 player or burn it on a CD. They charge $0.79 a song to download it."

iTunes: The Apple Alternative
Listen.com only works with Windows-based PCs. That is one of the reasons why Apple took it upon themselves to create their iTunes service. Whereas Listen.com has a flat monthly rate for their core services, Apple charges for each download, but it is free to listen to 30-second snippets of each song. And each version has their fans.

"Now, a lot of people are saying that the reason that iTunes is so successful is that it dispenses with the flat monthly fee," Brad Hill says. "But I think that monthly payment thing, which makes the service feel free, is extremely valuable," such as with Listen.com's $9.95 per month fee for unlimited downloading to their player. "If you use the service effectively, you get whole albums for pennies, and you never worry about how much you're spending; you forget that you're paying $10 a month. Even if when you don't use it for a couple of month, it still feels free and it feels good to be a subscriber-and that's the element missing with iTunes."

We may know sooner, rather than later, which model will survive. Hill believes that by Christmas, Windows users will be able to use iTunes. "And that will be a watershed moment-then we'll really learn what is special about iTunes. If it's strongly adopted by the Windows community, then everything I've said will have been wrong and that iTunes has something unique going for it, that everybody likes." If though, as Hill suspects, iTunes is not strongly adopted in the Windows community, then it will be more obvious that its initial fanfare was based on it being, as Hill says, "a Macintosh-service, not because it's a particularly good service."

Peer-to-Peer: The Wild West's Last Outpost
Services such as Listen.com and iTunes now provide legal alternatives to peer-to-peer downloading. When the RIAA managed to shut Napster down in 2001 (although the still very famous name will apparently be reborn as the legal downloading service to be launched by Roxio around Christmas of this year), peer-to-peer downloading simply spread to dozens of smaller services, making it that much more difficult for the RIAA to fight.

In a move that generated an outpouring of negative publicity, in late June, the RIAA threatened to track down and sue users of file-sharing programs. The result? The Washington Post reported, "Maybe MP3 downloaders are interpreting the recording industry's threat-an escalation from its earlier strategy of targeting file-sharing developers-as a sort of 'last call' announcement", and that usage of file sharing programs actually increased.

The thinking behind many of the users of file sharing is that if I own a product, I should be free to copy it and give it to others. Naturally, the RIAA does not agree with this sort of thinking-and essentially, they are right. It is theft, under most interpretations of copyright laws. But because the recording industry dragged its heels so slowly in coming up with legal alternatives (such as Listen.com, Emusic.com and Apple's iTunes), programs such as Kazaa (www.kazaa.com), Grokster (www.grokster.com) and others have flourished.

Most experts feel that the rise of these sites is due to the music industry's inability to understand the fundamental change that digital technology has brought to music. However, they also feel that peer-to-peer is going to play a part of how the music industry makes money, but not without additional regulatory control over how the music is licensed and royalties tracked.

"Music Is A Stream Of Bits"
While the press is likely to describe Peer-to-peer networks as one of the last aspects of the World Wide Web's Wild West days to be brought under regulatory control, there will probably always be fans exchanging files via the 'Net and thousands of music-oriented Websites. Also, many new artists are willing to sacrifice royalties for the enormous potential exposure that the Web offers.

Even as regulations made life more difficult for some, technology has made it easier than ever to graft music onto a Website. For example, a few months ago, the popular Weblog-oriented Blogcritics.org site added an MP3 section dubbed "Blogcritics Radio" for new artists to ply their wares.

And plenty of MP3 trading goes on in otherwise text-oriented newsgroups such as alt.binaries.sound.radio.oltime, which, as its name implies, allows its users to exchange files of old radio broadcasts. An extensive listing of dozens of other MP3-oriented USENET Newsgroups is available at www.audiofind.com.

All of these various sites and groups are part of the rich array of music the Web has to offer, as it radically transforms music and how it is acquired by listeners.

"It seems clear to me that music is no longer discs packaged in jewel cases, sold in physical stores and it will be decreasingly that as time goes on," Brad Hill perceptively notes. "Music is now files and even more granularly than files, music is bits. It's just a stream of bits."

And there are a lot of those bits waiting to be heard on the Internet. 100-percent free music may be a thing of the past on the Web, but for many, so are the days of paying $15.95 for a CD with one great song and a lot of filler.