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Review of pressplay and RealOne
c64guy writes: "Okay, so we all know that the music labels launched their own digital music subscription services, and that the new for-pay Napster should be debuting any minute. Here's a particularly in-depth review that compares the nitty-gritty of the services. For example, with RealOne, you can only ever have 200 tracks activated on your system. Even if you've been subscribed for eight months and downloaded 1600 tracks, you can still only listen to 200 of them in one month."
I was not impressed with their selection. They had spotty atrist coverage and some artists had only half of their tracks available. My biggest two beefs:
1) You lost all your downloaded music when you cancel (you can keep burnt music obviously.)
2) All your music is stuck inside of pressplay. No mp3 player support.
Background:
In the last week of February 2002, the RIAA announced that shipments by record companies slipped 10.3% from 2000 to 2001. According to Reuters, this is the music industry's worst slump in a decade. "When 23% of surveyed music consumers say they are not buying more music because they are downloading or copying their music for free, we cannot ignore the impact on the marketplace," RIAA President Hilary Rosen said in a statement.
In a recent attempt to turn a profit from the whole digital music scene, the Major Labels created content alliances and launched paid subscription services providing access to their digital content. Sony, Universal, EMI (and over eighty smaller labels) launched PressPlay and RealNetworks launched RealOne MusicPass in partnership with MusicNet whose labels include BMG, EMI, Zomba, & AOL Time Warner. For now, these services are available in the U.S. only.
About me:
Let's get this out of the way up-front: I'm a pirate. Two years ago I ripped my 270 CDs to MP3 and pawned them to get a bigger hard drive. With my Cambridge SoundWorks speakers, SoundBlaster Live and MusicMatch Jukebox, my computer surpassed my stereo's phatness of sound. Bye bye boombox; no more physical media. P2P file-sharing (new at the time) made the analog-digital conversion that much sweeter.
I now have about 200 Gigs of digital content with components that wirelessly send audio and video (divx) out to my surround system and TV. I love my digital media. For me and many others, there's no turning back.
Having said that, I was interested to see what the labels were doing with their new subscription services. So, for the purposes of this review, I'm going to put my personal bias aside, get down with the payments and take a look under their hoods.
Terms You'll Need To Know:
Stream: When you stream a song or video from a music service, the file is not stored on your computer for future playback. Listening to a streamed song or video for more than thirty seconds counts against your subscription streams. If you stream the same song twice, this also counts against your subscription.
Download: Downloaded songs are saved to your computer. When the song is done playing, the download stays on your drive. You can play an activated download as often as you want without paying another credit.
Burn: Some downloads can be burned onto a CD as an audio track that will be playable in a regular CD player. Burning a track costs a burn credit.
Activate: You may have downloaded a song from the online music service, but you won't be able to play it until you activate it. This process contacts the music service and deducts one credit from your account, while simultaneously "activating" the song so you can listen to it.
Getting dirty:
All of the subscription services are accessed through a program that you must download and install. After installation you can just double-click on their happy little icons to start 'em up. Be sure to be online at the time though, because they're heavily web-dependent.
Click through to the reviews:
So, What's My Conclusion?
If I had to subscribe to one of these services right now I'd go with pressplay. If I could wait and test the new Napster, and if it worked well, I would probably go with Napster instead.
That being said, if I didn't have to subscribe to any of these services, I wouldn't. And neither will the majority of music pirates. Why? Well there are a number of huge problems:
First, did you notice that a lot of great artists were not found in any of the test searches? Exactly. The problem is that instead of creating one huge subscription service, they created several smaller ones, each carrying only some music. Users won't want to pay for three subscriptions to access all of the music that they like. They'll just use the illegal P2P software that gives them access to everything instead.
Second, even though you're paying for their content, they are restricting how you can use it/burn it, and it won't play on an MP3 player. The point of digital media is convenience, and MP3s that you can only play on your computer just aren't convenient.
Third, when you stop paying, you lose your songs, making these services thinly-disguised music rental outlets. It's kind of like HMV saying that if you stop buying CDs from them, every album you've ever purchased at an HMV disappears.
Fourth, the fact that they limit how many tracks you can purchase per month means that they are limiting their own profit-making ability and our ability to get the content we want. Why wouldn't they let you purchase additional credits when you run out? I really don't know what they were thinking here, it just doesn't make cents.
Fifth, I think they're targeting the wrong demographic. A RealOne representative informed me that their target market is young males 24-35 with a higher than average income who want easy legal access to the latest in hip music. Is this the market that is currently causing the most losses for the RIAA? The logical step would be to target the demographic most likely pirating digital music -- students 18-24 years of age. In order to convert a pirate you would have to provide them with a lot of added value, and if you're adding that much value, you'll hook the other demographics too.
Sixth, you need a credit card to get in on the action. It's very easy to integrate PayPal support for debit cards these days, and that would make their services much more accessible to the under 25 demographic.
Lastly, and most problematic:
There are too many free, easily accessible peer-to-peer applications out there. I conducted an informal survey of 120 journalism and fashion students at Humber College in Toronto and though very few (less than 10%) said they "liked" computers, over 95% of them had used peer-to-peer software to get their music and said they would not pay for a similar service. One student said he would consider it if it was affordable, but that he didn't have a credit card.
In the end, somehow the music subscription services need to figure out how to add value to their pay services in order to make them more attractive, otherwise they will never really take off.
NEW NAPSTER
Little information is known as of yet, because it hasn't been released. I wasn't able to try the service hands-on, but here's a preview of what's to come.
The Start-up Screen: Will include the basic categories of music you can browse (like pressplay), as well as some featured tracks and artists. Your music player, instant messenger, and transfer monitor are also viewable from the main page. The navigation buttons include: Home, Search, Browse, Library, Chat, Discover (new content), Transfers, Hot List (people you've gotten tracks from before), and Player.
Finding Music: The new Napster will add content browsing to the familiar search box. I'm not sure if you'll be able to browse by popularity of download and by sub-genre, but at least it's a move in the right direction.
Streaming: N/A
Upon Unsubscription: It is currently unclear whether your music will self-destruct when you cancel your subscription.
How It Works: The new Napster uses a technology called "Bandwidth Harvesting." In order to conserve bandwidth on Napster's servers, every time you request a file, the software tries to download it from another user first (transfers are logged, so you still get charged if the track isn't free). If no one has the track, then you get it from their servers, which have high quality copies of all content available on the Napster network.
Before a file is transferred through the Napster Network, it is 'wrapped' in a secure NAP sleeve that defines how that content may be used. All file transfers are logged, so although I may have certain abilities to play a track, someone who downloads that track from me may have different abilities/restrictions depending on how much they paid.
Music Partners: Much of the music available through RealOne MusicPass will be available on Napster through a partnership with MusicNet and over 5000 additional indie labels.
Secure Music: Yes, but also supports non-secure music (such as MP3)
Distribution Technology: Centralized/Decentralized Hybrid.
Pros:
Acts as a distribution platform/system for indie artists. Napster will offer artists and labels tools to register as rights holders and get paid for sharing their music on Napster. Rights holders can set rules for how their music files are used, check their account status online, and receive quarterly statements. This is brilliant: You can now sell your stuff via Napster. They are poised to become the first true digital label.
Like pressplay, the ability to Browse content should be exemplary.
Cons:
They sold out to The Man. (Ok, so they were taken to court and had to change, but it still left a bad taste in my mouth.)
Previous Napster users must sign up again with a new login and password, presumably due to new privacy policies, etc. This is, arguably, not that big an issue.
Usability: Everything that I have seen makes me believe it will be a very easy to use and eye-pleasing system.
The skinny: If Napster allows you to keep your content after you cancel your subscription, and if they can find a way to make it play on MP3 players, and if the cost is right, I believe that the new Napster will blow RealOne MusicPass out of the water and surpass their 500,000 subscriber mark (which took eighteen months to establish) within one year of launch. Because they have partnered with over 5000 indie labels, they will be the place to get hard-to-find indie content, legally. (As an aside: While many people pirate music from P2P music services, most think twice about pirating indie artists' stuff. This is where Napster will have an edge. The other music subscription services all focus on content from the major labels, who music pirates do not empathize with, and whose content they do not hesitate to nab.)
REALONE
Pricing:
$9.95 U.S.per month for a RealOne MusicPass which includes 100 downloads, 100 streams (without exclusive/premier content, and with ads intermingled with the streaming radio content), and 0 burns per month.
$14.95 U.S. per month for a RealOne MusicPass with 175 downloads, 175 streams
$19.95 U.S. per month for a RealOne MusicPass with 200 downloads, 200 streams
$19.95 U.S.per month for a RealOne SuperPass Gold, which includes 125 downloads, 125 streams (including the exclusive/premium RealOne content and ad-free genre-based streaming radio), and 0 burns per month.
$24.95 U.S. per month for a SuperPass Gold, which includes 200 downloads, 200 streams.
Payment Method: credit card only
Availability: currently U.S.only
Platform: PC Only
The Start-up Screen: Includes a number of featured songs, videos, news, and artists. There are seven main navigation sections in the start-up webpage, including: Games, Lifestyle, Music, Sport, Entertainment, News, and RealOne Central. The main program buttons are: Now Playing (for playlists), Web (the aforementioned webpage), My Library, CD, Devices, Radio, Channels (video), and Search. Much of the RealOne Player's interface is web-based, resulting in a slower, less satisfying user-experience than with pressplay.
Finding Music: There is a nice"search" button that allows you to search Radio, Music and RealOne content, but due to a technical glitch, the RealOne content option doesn't always appear, making it impossible to find any of the service's music. (See "Usability" for more details.)
Unfortunately, RealOne doesn't offer anything like pressplay's "Browse Available Music" feature.
Streaming: Genre-based radio stations and television-like video channels. In an overnight test designed to use all of my available streams, the RealOne player lost its connection to the RealServer.
Buffering was also an issue, which it always seems to be with Real. Content stuttered frequently.
Upon Unsubscription: Thirty days after you activate your music, if you do not renew it (that is, if your subscription is cancelled), all of your music will de-activate itself.
How It Works: You start with anywhere from 125 to 200 credits. You can then spend those credits to either a) download and activate a new song, or b) keep a track you already have downloaded active for another month. Once you download a song, you must activate it before you can listen to it. This process is easy and only requires a few clicks, but if you download a lot of songs at once, it can be kind of tedious.
Do My Downloads Accumulate?: No. If you want to keep a track that you downloaded for an additional month, you must spend an additional credit. Hence, you can only ever have 200 active RealOne tracks on your system.
# Artists: Over 10,000 artists and 75,000 songs
Music Partners: BMG Entertainment, EMI Music, Zomba, AOL Time Warner (MusicNet), RealNetworks
Pros:
Ability to run in toolbar mode.
Access to exclusive RealOne streaming content is nice.
Cons:
You can't buy more music than their best plan offers.
Their exclusive streaming content quality is not as good as they claim it is, and it still exhibits the typical RealIssues -- namely lengthy "buffering" before playback, even on high speed internet.
There are banner ads in the media browser.
The required RealOne player is too web-integrated: Even with broadband it's underwhelmingly pokey.
Unused download credits do not carry over to the next month.
SneakyMoves:
You can't burn tracks that you download from RealOne, even though RealOne has music burning software built in. The burning feature is only for non-RealOne music. This is not obvious when you sign up.
If you unsubscribe, your music commits suicide.
Integrated CDR Software?: Yes, but you can only burn MP3s and Windows Media content. You cannot burn the RealOne content you paid for.
Usability: The re-jigged RealJukebox application is easy to use, but it locked up frequently when attempting to open the Media Browser (which is where you can see all of your content). Granted, I have about 12,000 tracks, but MusicMatch Jukebox has no problem with it. It was also a little slow, and tended to bog down my system (a 667 Mhz P3 with 768 RAM).
It took me several days to figure out how to find tracks, because the RealOne Content search option was missing. It turns out that for some reason the service was automatically logging me out without telling me (The RealOne search is only available when you're online). The only way I found to remedy this was to shut down, restart the RealOne player and immediately search for RealOne content before I was auto-logged out. So much for usability: There is no way my parents could have figured this out.
Can I play RealOne MusicPass content on my MP3 player: No.
Distribution Technology: Centralized proprietary MusicNet technology
# Users: More than 500,000 paying subscribers to all RealOne services -- more than any other pay service.
Additional Comments: Real's pay-music initiative in particular is merely providing 'passing fancy' access: You can listen to your tracks until you're sick of all 100 of them, and then you can ditch them and get new tracks. At ten cents per track per month though, you'll be paying $1.20 U.S. per song per year for your music. So, unlike CDs in music stores, the longer you want to have the music, the more it will cost you. At this rate, my current music collection would cost me roughly $27,000 Canadian annually to maintain, and I know several people with more digital music than me. Ouch.
Test Searches:
They Do Have: Radiohead, Massive Attack, Stereolab, Sneaker Pimps, Django Reinhardt, Sinatra
They Do NOT Have: Madonna, The Beatles, U2 (1 track), Diana Krall, Eminem, Moby (1 track), Harry Connick Jr., Mandalay, Esthero, Limp Bizket, Blues Brothers
The skinny: The fact that I can't put my songs on an MP3 player or a CD knocks RealOne out of contention immediately. I'm tied to my PC if I want to listen to my RealOne content: Blah. Furthermore, their software bugs need to be worked out. Not only can I not take my songs with me, but all too often I couldn't even access them.
Pay Service Rating: 1 out of 5.
PRESSPLAY
Pricing:
$9.95 U.S.per month gets you 30 downloads, 300 streams, and 0 burns.
$15 U.S.per month gets you 50 downloads, 500 streams, and 10 burns.
$20 U.S.per month gets you 75 downloads, 750 streams, and 15 burns.
$25 U.S.per month gets you 100 downloads, 1000 streams, and 20 burns.
Payment Method: credit card only
Availability: currently U.S.only
Platform: PC Only
The Start-up Screen: pressplay's start-up screen gives you quick access to the most recently added content and featured tracks in various genres. There are six toolbar-style buttons: Home, Find Music, My Music, Burn Tracks, Download Status, and Message Boards.
Finding Music: pressplay makes finding the music you want very easy. You can either use the "search" function or you can browse all of their available music by popularity of download, artist, album, genre, and sub-genre. (For example, some of the sub-genres of rap include East Side and West Side.)
This browsing feature is sweet. You never have to wonder "What is there to download?" -- you can just dig right in and browse pressplay's entire collection. (And then you can cry to mommy when you've used up your entire quota in the first two days.)
Beside each track there are one or more icons. A wave icon indicates that you can stream the track, a downward arrow icon indicates that you can download it, and a little flame indicates that you can burn the track after you've downloaded it. Which raises an important point: No, you can't burn every track that's available for download. Usage is restricted.
Streaming: Streaming on pressplay is extremely easy, and almost streamed on my 33.6 dial-up. Just click on the water symbol, and it streams. Voila!
Upon Unsubscription: Should your account become inactive, all of the music you have downloaded to date will automatically deactivate itself.
How It Works: When you complete a download, stream more than thirty seconds of a song, or burn a track, it makes the appropriate deduction from your account. pressplay automatically activates all downloaded songs so that they are immediately available for playback.
Do My Downloads Accumulate?: Yes. Tracks that you download this month will be accessible to you next month at no extra charge.
# Artists: unspecified
Music Partners: Sony, Universal, EMI, Madacy, Matador, Navarre, Owie, Razoe & Tie, Roadrunner, Rounder (over eighty-two labels in total), MSN Music, Roxio, MP3.com, Yahoo music.
Pros:
The ability to browse all of pressplay's content is amazing. This is something that none of the P2P software can do, due to its dynamic nature. pressplay's system works just like a jukebox application on your local machine. Very simple and powerful.
There are no banner ads.
The integrated Roxio CD burning software is great.
Unlike RealOne, pressplay allows you to accumulate and carry over your downloads from one month to the next.
Genre-specific message boards are nice (but in my opinion there should be more than fifteen genres).
File management and playback abilities are integrated and very easy to use.
Cons:
You cannot buy more tracks than their best plan offers.
Paying for streams that are not exclusive to pressplay and are available on other free streaming radio stations is bollocks! It's like charging you to listen to the radio! [Ed.'s note: Of course, now that web broadcasters have to pay royalties to stream songs over the net, free streaming web radio could be a thing of the past.]
Unused burn, stream and download credits do not carry over for use the next month.
Sneaky Moves:
You will be billed if you do not proactively cancel your fourteen-day "free" trial at the end of those fourteen days.
You can't burn more than two tracks per artist per month. Because you have to be online to burn pressplay downloads and you have use the integrated burning software (the tracks are encrypted), pressplay can monitor what you burn. Want to make a mixed Radiohead CD? Too bad. You can't. You can mix two Radiohead tracks with other artists' tracks though.
If you unsubscribe, all of the tracks you've downloaded to date deactivate themselves and become unplayable. So, if you've been a subscriber of the Premium Plan for a year, you lose $400 of music. (Your tracks can be reactivated if you re-subscribe within six months). I can't imagine how frustrating this would be for a dial-up user.
Integrated CDR Software?: Yes, by Roxio.
Usability: Great! This is a very polished user experience.
Can I play my pressplay content on my MP3 player: Not yet, but they are working on it.
Distribution Technology: Centralized proprietary technology
# Users: pressplay would not release these numbers
Test Searches:
They Do Have: Harry Connick Jr., Massive Attack, Radiohead
They Do NOT Have: Madonna, The Beatles, Django Reinhardt, Paris Combo, I am Sam Soundtrack.
The skinny: The user experience is slick and easy. This counts for a lot. The browsing feature is magnificent. However, only being able to burn two tracks per artist per month, combined with the possibility of losing access to all of your downloads if you decide you don't want to keep paying the pressplay bill... Well, that just creates unhappy images in my head.
Pay Service Rating: 2.5 stars out of 5. (Yes, I'm harsh. But I'm a technophile.)
Let me see... I can either have limited downloads in a proprietary, non-burnable format that explodes if I ever unsubscribe... Or I can unlimited downloads in MP3 format that I can burn, put on multiple machines, and keep forever. Think, think, think...
Seriously, Emusic kicks all three of these services' asses. Kicks them, gives them wedgies, then sends them home to their rich parents crying. Sure, you don't have the big-name lables, but you have tons of small ones. And the unlimited-download model lets you experiment with every band you've never heard of. Having used this to find Front Line Assembly more than makes up for the lack of Massive Attack.
I wonder why Emusic wasn't in the running? I'd give it a 4/5, myself.
The enemies of Democracy are
So he says he's "a pirate", but all he says is that he ripped his CDs for personal use. I don't see anywhere that he runs a FTP server to "share" the music or has uploaded to napster in the past, or anything that would take that music collection beyond personal use.
He does say: P2P file-sharing (new at the time) made the analog-digital conversion that much sweeter. But it isn't clear if he used P2P to get music that he didn't own, his main point is that he has MP3'ed (my word) his music collection. Perhaps he downloaded some of the music he had on CD via P2P, that is a grey area, but not hard-core piracy.
This seems to me that he has bought into the FUD that the music labels are spreading: (rip, mix, burn) == (music piracy). And that is simply not true. (or at least not proven/held up in a court of law)
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
I like Emusic. I think it meets all of these requirements. It might be -2- clicks to get to the rest of the songs by a band, but I'm not 100%. :)
The enemies of Democracy are
When Napster came out it was a way for you to hear that really cool new song. A way to sample the music you buy, without having to filter through the much on the radio. And the recording industry's sales went up because people were more inclined to buy what they'd listened to.
Now, RIAA's made it clear that their enemy is anyone who shares music online. They fired the first shot by biting the hand that was just beginning to feed them. Now the same people who were browsing through downloads and buying at Tower are burning not buying. Because they're angry with RIAA and they feel the record industry is out to get them. No wonder RIAA's sales are down (although , probably not as much as they say, RIAA's cooked up some phony numbers before), though it has very little to do with P2P file-sharing.
If the record industry really wants to shut down Morpheus they could offer the following service.
Sharing would be rampant, but it already is. RIAA wouldn't be losing anything even if the whole thing fell through. But it probably wouldn't.
Too bad I don't have millions of dollars and my dad isn't the head of Sony Music.
Sweat
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
There IS no client! You download music off their site with your favorite web browser, and that's it. You login, you download, you listen to MP3's.
Though to get the neat feature of 1-click album downloads, you need to have Freeamp installed (Win, Unix ports, don't know about Mac). You can use anything as your player, Freeamp is only needed for downloading whole albums.
The enemies of Democracy are
1) You could, but it's a felony under DMCA. Circumvention of a copy control mechanism.
2) You might not be able to. MSFT's "Secure Audio Path" is a step in the direction of locking down the hardware. (Under CBDTPA, this will be mandatory.)
3) Even if you could ("could" in the legal sense and and the sense of any technical crippling imposed by your operating system), you wouldn't want to. It'd be like saving a .JPG file as a .JPG - the encoding to MP3 is lossy, and you'd lose quality.
(This is, of course, the goal of the Content Cartel -- to make your computer, which is a device based on the principle that bits are infinitely reproducible, work like a cassette tape made of atoms which are not reproducible.)