PC World's 20th World Class Awards
Our gala celebration of 2002's best hardware, software, and sites--plus a few of the all-time greats.
The Editors of PC World
World Class: Losers of the Year
MusicNet, PressPlay
We understand why the music industry might worry about MP3s and
file-sharing networks like Morpheus and BearShare. We can even see how
reasonable people might think that copy-protecting CDs makes good business
sense. So let's get this straight: The recording industry wants to kill digital
music as we know it; and as an alternative, it's offering a service where you
can download a limited selection of digital music files, but you can play them
only as long as you're a subscriber. Right. Until they're done well, services
like
MusicNet and
PressPlay
just add insult to injury. One suggestion to the labels driving these services:
Ask the movie industry about a DVD distribution experiment called Divx.
