Easy as MP3

Pay for It

Where will digital audio go from here? Napster seemed to promise access to the entire catalog of recorded music from the beginning of time, available on demand over the Internet, but you can forget about that. What you can expect to become available soon are subscription services that give limited access to music for a monthly fee.

Many record companies are launching such subscription services. Record labels Sony and Universal Music Group, in conjunction with Microsoft, have put together a service called Pressplay, while AOL Time Warner, BMG Entertainment, EMI, and RealNetworks have teamed up to form a competing service, MusicNet. These services will be licensed to other companies that will in turn offer them to the public. Ironically, Napster's subscription service will be one of these MusicNet licensees.

To Feel the Music, Please Insert $$$

When it's launched, Pressplay MSN (Microsoft's cobranded version of Pressplay) will provide "access to tens of thousands of songs from a wide variety of artists, representing more than 50 percent of major-label content available today," according to an MSN spokesperson. Whether its monthly subscription fee will permit unlimited downloads or will restrict users to a certain number of songs per month was still undetermined at the time we went to press. The fee for the service had not been set either, although MSN claims it will be "competitive." The music offered through the service will be copy-protected using Windows Media Player's Digital Rights Management feature, but whether that will let you copy music to a portable player is also up in the air. Other parties, including FullAudio and EMusic, are set to offer competing services. FullAudio expects its service to cost between $5 and $15 a month. At launch, users won't be able to copy music to a portable player, but FullAudio spokesperson Sandy Rapp claimed that the ability to copy music to players that support Microsoft's Digital Rights Management system is "in the works."

These music subscription services will require you to use their software to play the music. Pressplay MSN will insist on a player that supports WMA, and the Napster subscription service will demand a new version of the Napster client that includes a secure music player from PlayMedia systems. Record companies will set rules that determine whether you can copy the music you get from these services to other devices or even to portable players.

In addition, Macrovision, a copy-protection and digital rights management technology company, has begun working with record labels to copy-protect music CDs, using a system called SafeAudio. If you try to rip a protected CD to an MP3 file, the resulting music file will sound garbled.

Which Format Wins?

Although the new subscription services will try to promote their own file formats, millions of MP3 files have already been created and are still being swapped over the Internet. That should give the MP3 format an advantage for years to come. But whatever file format you choose, and however you play it, there is no doubt that the future of music lies with the Internet.