On The New York Times website we can read an interesting article in which legal music-downloading services such as MusicNet, Pressplay and Rhapsody are discussed.
Although the idea of paying for downloaded music is good, the services all have a price plan that is too complex. Besides that these services pretty much all offer the same songs and there are huge gaps in their catalogs:
No matter which service you try, you'll almost always pay more for an album's worth of music than you would by buying a CD in the store. Furthermore, none of these services exploit the virtues of the Web by including lyrics, tour dates and other news. |
Nonetheless, these commercial music libraries would seem like amazing, groundbreaking inventions if only they didn't follow other, more amazing and groundbreaking inventions: KaZaA and its ilk, sites where every song is available, burnable and free. You never have to wade through the complexities of the prices and rights matrices. No wonder people have stayed away from the commercial libraries in droves.
If the tide is finally starting to turn, as the record companies fervently hope, two forces are at work. First, somebody is poisoning the well at the free swapping services, trying to waste music fans' time by uploading mislabeled, truncated and sonically garbled versions of the most popular songs. (The culprits aren't identifying themselves, but unhappy music fans think they have a pretty good idea who's at work here.)
The second force is the gradual refinement of the commercial music libraries. They're gradually filling in the musical holes, simplifying pricing and stumbling toward a business model that isn't quite as repellent to consumers. Almost everyone expects that they'll find that formula someday; it's all about defining the terms.
When you read the article you understand why these legal music-downloading services are no success.. Read the complete article here (registration required).
Source: The NY Times
