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Subscription Portability: Can You Take It With You?

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.