Word: musicnet
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...Real should know this better than anyone. The company owns 40% of MusicNet, the brand-new AOL-Time Warner/Bertelsmann/EMI collaboration that will supposedly open the floodgates to mass-market, legal music downloads. With that service set to launch this summer, it's high time RJP set itself up for the deluge. No one else is in such a good position, with millions of users and with MusicNet working just down the corridor. Yet the only update planned to the service is to allow users to burn special MP3 CDs as well as the regular...
...enough to make you think the era of pay-to-play music downloading has finally dawned. Spurred on by the MusicNet deal, Sony and Vivendi Universal hastily announced that their licensing service, known as Duet, had found its first customer in the shape of Yahoo. MTV.com said it had done its own deal with all five major labels. And Microsoft hopped on the bandwagon with the radio-style site MSN Music. Result: in just one week "the landscape changed 100%," says Eric Scheirer, digital-music analyst at Forrester Research...
...question: In what format will your music arrive? Can the industry create a standard that will satisfy users who want MP3s they can transfer to portable players and CDs, while protecting copyright owners? "We don't know all the details," admits Richard Wolpert, the Real executive who helped create MusicNet. But "it's fair to say [the files] won't be free-and-clear MP3s as we know them...
...choose, in a process so seamless that you won't mind paying for it monthly. The nightmare scenario: a poor selection of music in confusing and conflicting file formats that will drive you underground to a Napster clone like Aimster. So every portal needs to do a deal with MusicNet and Duet--at the very least. "None of these services can survive without content from all five major labels," says Dannielle Romano, music analyst at Jupiter Media Metrix. Not to mention the hundreds of independent labels they'll need licenses from...
...websites the same status as radio stations, which pay royalty fees for playing music. Says Barry: "It's government intervention. It's not my first choice. But collecting licenses [in the open market] is not just painful, it's impossible." If AOL and Yahoo start feeling his pain once MusicNet and Duet kick in this summer, you may see a lot more rockers singing the Senate blues...