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AOL Enters Music Service Fray
Masem writes "Several sites, including The Washington Post and News.com report that AOL is planning to enter the online music service market with its own MusicNet offering. The service rates vary from $4 to $18/month, the latter giving you unlimited downloads and streaming content and 10 burnable tracks a month to CD. Future plans will include a pay-as-you-burn cost as well, expected later this year. However, the service is strictly limited to AOL customers, making many wonder if it will grab enough attention of the current subscriber base to actually be of value."
Its cheaper than this AOL crap, and allows unlimited downloads and unrestricted use of the music.
The downside is that it doesn't have Top 40 type stuff, and all files are 128kB/s, but they got tons of good music if you're willing to dig a little. (It helps if you're into jazz and/or punk).
I just wanted to bring them up as an example of a site doing it right, and worth checking out. I signed up not on principle, but because they had a bunch of albums I wanted.
Music Match MX is the best. They found the correct way of providing this service. Both sound quality and pricewise. For me the sound quality is much more important though. Other than MX, I did like emusic.com but their 128 kbit Mp3's were awful for me.. I am still subscriber for them too.
Music Match MX, I think, uses MP3pro instead of Mp3. That probably explains the good quality. If you select CD quality for MX, the sound quality satisfies me. I am usually satisfied with 256kbit Mp3's minimum.
MX Gold ($3/mon) gives you something like a radio, you select an artist and listen to similar artists. You can skip songs if you want. Great for new music discovery. But MX also has a Artist on Demand feature if you buy the platinum service ($5/month). So you can only listen to songs from one or more groups. You don't get to select the songs, but you can skip to the next song if you want. Usually first songs are the popular ones.
You can create your radio stations based on artists, era, genre, and select the weighting of these. The system works great for me.
The current "on-demand" subscription services (the major ones being Pressplay, MusicNet, Listen.com's Rhapsody) all have licenses from all 5 major labels plus a number of indies that allow them to do the following:
- on-demand streaming (e.g., search for a track and stream it)
- tethered downloads - DRM'd downloads that can only be played on the PC they were downloaded to
- burnable/portable downloads
The licenses from the labels generally require the subscription service to pay a small fee (say, 0.2 cents) for each song streamed or each time a tethered download is played. Each time a portable/burnable download is purchased, the label gets about 50 cents. The music publisher gets an additional fee of roughly 8.5 cents.The prices now are all about $9 to $10 per month for unlimited streams and tethered downloads plus about $1 per track for burnable/portable downloads. Rhapsody and MusicNet currently don't offer transfers to portable players, only burns, but of course you can rip to MP3 after burning.
Currently the selection is variable, with some albums or tracks not available at all, some only available for streaming/tethered downloads but not for burning, etc., but the selection has been steadily improving over time. For example the current no. 1 album by 50 Cent is available on all of the services, and is available for burning. The Norah Jones album that just won 8 Grammys is as well. Some artists like Dave Matthews, Madonna, Metallica and the Beatles own their own digital rights and have not allowed their music to be made available on the subscription services yet.
Another issue affecting availablility is publishing rights - the subscription services need to make deals with publishers representing songwriters in addition to the artist or label who controls the master (recording) rights. In many cases this is why only certain tracks on an album may be available.