Music unlimited

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At the risk of straining the metaphor, the current situation with digital music download services could be summarised as follows.

The free lunch may not be over, but there are fewer restaurants serving for free and it is becoming increasingly difficult not to justify paying for your meal. While many music industry executives may have had their heads firmly in the sand while the MP3 revolution spearheaded by Napster was taking place in the late nineties, the copyright holders have now responded with a range of services that allow music fans to download music legally from the Net.

Single most attractive feature
One of the reasons for the popularity of the initial flood of copyright-infringing free services was that most people object to paying EUR*15.99 or more for a CD when they only really wanted a couple of tracks from it. By downloading MP3s from the Web they could choose the tracks they wanted that other users had copied from their CDs. Of course the record companies told us that all this freewheeling swapping was going to bankrupt them and leave their artists penniless (good joke!). In more recent times they have realised that there is revenue to be made from online sales – last year music downloads surpassed the sales of singles for the first time.

Clearly the music industry was concerned that by putting its valuable product out for sale on the Internet, it would just make it easier for users to swap and copy music without any money flowing back to them. What has made them change their mind is the improvements that have been made to digital rights management (DRM) software which makes it difficult to make unauthorised copies of the music you purchase from download services. Note we said difficult and not impossible. The bottom line is that even the current generation of digital rights management software, such as that embedded in Windows Media Player 10, can be circumvented if you have the time and technical savvy. For example, files in Microsoft’s WMA format that have been downloaded from legal sites cannot be transferred directly to an iPod because of the embedded DRM. However, if you burn these files to a CD ROM, the DRM is removed and then the tracks can be imported and converted to Apple’s AAC format by iTunes.

Janus joins the party
Windows Media Player 10 incorporates DRM technology called Janus, which is much more flexible and provides support for transferring files from your PC to a portable digital player. If those files are from a subscription service you can continue to play them while your subscription is in place, but once it lapses so do does your ability to play them back.

Pirates still popular
Despite the record labels having finally got their finger out, there are still a host of file sharing services such as Kazaa and Soulseek, that allow you to swap MP3s with other users of their service. They claim they are merely providing the technology (much the same way manufacturers of video recorders argued that their technology should not be outlawed at the request of the film studios) and they cannot be responsible if users are breaking copyright law in their use of it. Clearly this is just a legal argument – log onto any of those networks and you’ll see that the vast bulk of the activity is in swapping the same mainstream artists that are available from the paid services.

And despite the improvements in the range and quality of legal services, the unregulated file sharing services – even with the hassle of viruses and adware – are still a huge hit with music fans. Apple, the leader in the space, has served up just over 300 million tracks from the iTunes Music Store since it was launched in April 2003 in the US. In contrast, research by BigChampagne LLC which tracks file sharing online, suggests that 1 billion tracks were swapped over the most popular networks in January alone.

Under the spotlight

Irish online music stores

Eircom Net Music Club (www.eircom.net/music)

Part of the Eircom.net portal the Eircom Net Music Club was the first heavily marketed legal download service in Ireland. Although the service is branded as Eircom’s, you are actually getting access to the OD2 library which also powers services from the likes of Coca Cola, MSN, Virgin and MTV.

The service has over 400,000 tracks available and offers a number of ways to browse the catalogue and find something to suit your tastes whether that’s the latest electro-pop or some classic rock from the 60s. It offers an Artist of the Week, Spotlight, an Eircom selection and a top ten download chart to give you some ideas to start filling your player.

When you click to preview or stream a track, the Real Player opens in the bottom of your browser window (Firefox isn’t supported only Microsoft Internet Explorer), giving you access to all the usual playback controls. It also opens a Cue List which shows what tracks are in your queue or you’ve recently listened – very handy when you are on a shopping spree. It also means you can listen to a couple of tracks from a particular artist and continue your search without interfering with playback.

Eircom has an unusual pricing system that can be a little confusing at first. There are four ways to access music, all of which are priced differently. You can listen to a 30 second preview of a track for free, you can stream it to listen to it in its entirety once (1 credit), download it to your PC without the ability to burn it to CD or transfer to a player (usually 10 credits), or download it permanently with the ability to burn or transfer to CD or a digital player (prices start at 100 credits). One credit is equal to 1c but Eircom is currently doing a special offer whereby if you buy EUR*40 worth of credit, you’ll get another EUR*40 free i.e. 8000 credits for EUR*40.

DRM kicked in
Although we were happily able to browse the 30 second previews, once we started accessing the credit in our account we had to upgrade the DRM software that is part of Windows Media Player 9. This ensures we don’t do anything nasty like burn loads of copies onto CD for my friends. The files are provided in Microsoft’s WMA format which means you can play them back on most of the big name players on the market from the likes of Creative, Rio or Iriver but not the Apple iPod. The more credits you buy, or if you commit to a monthly subscription, the cheaper each track becomes. With the current special offer that doubles your credit, it works out at less than 75c per permanent download or under EUR*1 if you subsequently decide to go for the EUR*14.99 monthly subscription.
All in all, a solid service that could do with some more bells and whistles to showcase the vast library of music on offer.

Itunes Music Store Ireland

After a couple of years of looking longingly at the US iTunes Music Store, the service launched in Ireland at the tail end of last year with almost 700,000 tracks available to download. Unlike the other services you don’t access the Apple service through a browser. Instead you need to install the iTunes software (free to download from the Apple website at www.itunes.com or pre-installed on PCs from Apple, HP and other manufacturers). As you’d expect from Apple, the iTunes software is sleek and efficient and does the job of playing back digital music extremely well with some great features like Party Shuffle, Radio and a random feature that doesn’t have the annoying returning to the same track, like some other players on the market.

Although you don’t use a browser the iTunes interface is distinctly browser-like with familiar forward, back and home buttons for navigation. Clearly the iTunes Music Store is intended to increase sales of iPods – the music is downloaded in MPEG-4 Audio format, which of all the major digital music players is only supported by iPods. Referred to by Apple as AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) format, they argue it delivers sound quality similar to CDs but with a smaller file size which is quicker to download and takes up less space on your PC or iPod.

On the editorial side of things Apple’s service is head and shoulders above the competitors. The main page features banner ads for a range of artists from J-Lo to Jimi Hendrix and Nelly to The Boomtown Rats. You also get a selection of new releases, pre-releases, staff favourites, exclusives and recently added material. The exclusives are well worth the entry price, with artists exclusively providing material not available anywhere else. You also get one free tune made available each week such as the Daft Punk medley that we downloaded for nada.

Simple pricing scheme
The whole system of credits and pricing is also very transparent. There is no bulk discounting prices at the ITMS – all tracks cost 99c but if you want to buy a whole album it will generally be somewhere between EUR*9.99 and EUR*11.99 – a discount on buying the songs individually. When you have credit in your account, it simply shows you how many songs you can buy with that and also shows the account name so you can have more than one account on a single PC.

Other cool features include the ability to buy and download audio books, view other users playlists, and free music videos – although be warned, you’ll need a bit more than the basic broadband connection if you don’t want to be waiting ages for the high definition versions to download. Definitely a five star service but only iPod owners will get the value out of it.

MyCokeMusic.com (www.mycokemusic.com)

You may have seen the billboards around the country offering a free music download with every can of Coke purchased. This is the site you go to in order to redeem that offer. Like the Eircom service this is actually a branded version of On Demand Distribution’s (OD2) service, which is the largest digital music provider in Europe operating in 12 countries for brands like HMV, Ministry of Sound, Virgin and Packard Bell.

Although it uses OD2, unlike Eircom it calls a spade a spade when it comes to purchasing credit. You don’t buy credits, instead the amount of credit you have is expressed in euros and cents – a much more transparent system. MyCokeMusic offers three options for listening to music – a free 30 second preview, the ability to listen to a track once but not save it (“stream”) for 1c or download the track so you can store it on your PC, burn it to CD or save it to a digital music player for EUR*1.29. The latter is the most expensive per-download pricing of the three services we’ve reviewed here. The site only offers a pre-pay model, there’s no subscription model, but the advantage of that is you’ll only pay for what you use.

When we went to start downloading from MyCokeMusic.com we had to first download and install OD2’s Music Manager which was optional with the Eircom Net Music Club. It’s certainly a more efficient way of managing your downloads than the standard Windows interface and OD2 claims it is faster, although we didn’t see any perceptible difference in speed. Whether or not it was the use of the download manager or not the tags that identify the artists, album and track name to your playback software came in much cleaner than with Eircom’s service.

Some people may think of Coca Cola as a faceless US corporation but it was the only site that went to the bother of pulling together a collection of Irish artists – accessible from the prominent Irish Artists ad that is displayed on the right hand column of every page. The Irish genre features everyone from Brian Kennedy to Snow Patrol, Jemma Hayes to Planxty. We even tracked down an old Luka Bloom (brother of Christy Moore) track that we’d been looking for. In doing so though we accidently clicked on another track on the album. Unlike iTunes we weren’t prompted to make sure this was the track we wanted so my credit went down EUR*1.29 even though we cancelled the download.

MyCokeMusic.com claims to have 500,000 tracks from 12,500 artists and it does a good job of showcasing these through specific genre pages, charts, featured downloads and other editorial devices. Even though it is basically a customised front end on the same service as Eircom it came across as much easier to use. Unfortunately the price of tracks, which is going to be the deal breaker for most users, means more people are likely to opt for Eircom.

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