So the traditional darling of file sharers around the world, Napster, launched it’s UK paid for service the other week, and I have to say, I’m not in the least bit impressed.
For your £9.95 a month, you get to listen to their five radio stations (it’s like ShoutCast or Live365 never happened), download as many tracks as you want, but pay 99p to burn them to cd, or £9.95 for a full album. Alternatively, you can not pay the monthly fee, only stream 30 seconds of each track and pay £1.09 per track or £9.95 per album.
£9.95 per album. There is a quote on the BBC website from Mino Russo (marketing head at ace cheapo record shop Fopp) which could almost be paraphrased as “hahahahahahaha” as their (solid, tangible, lickable) CDs (with packaging - cover art and liner notes. ARE YOU LISTENING, ONLINE MUSIC STORE PEOPLE?) start at £5. And £1.09 per song? In Yankee dollars, at the time of writing, that’s about $1.99 - compared to the iTunes Music Store’s $0.99 (can’t find the ‘cent’ symbol on my keyboard…), it doesn’t stand up too well.
Now, I don’t buy into this whole ‘Napster isn’t Apple so it must be crap’ thing that you get on some websites, but the figures speak for themselves. I get the feeling that the folks at Napster were in too much of a hurry to get the jump on rival services to negotiate a decent fee for their wares.
What really gets me is the brazen short sightedness of Napster, MyCokeMusic, OD2 and the like. By this I mean the way you can only use their services if you use Windows 2000/XP and have bent over to receive Microsoft’s Windows Media Player 9 EULA. Now, before you dismiss this as another anti Microsoft rant, consider this. My laptop does not run Windows, granted, but neither does my phone, or my PDA, or my fridge.
With a separate ring tone download chart now accompanying the singles, albums and airplay charts in Music Week (industry rag), the providing of digital music in various forms to mobile devices (although why stop there? - hence the fridge thing) is big business, and one that is only set to grow.
The major problem here is that the bandwidth available to telephones is nowhere near sufficient for transfer of files of that size, but that is set to change. Indeed, as more phones become GPRS enabled, downloads become more feasible, but the real biggie is just starting to appear on the horizon. I mean 3G. Not 3’s commendable, but ultimately misguided efforts (look, watching footy clips on your mobile might look good on paper, and in TV adverts, but how many people actually do it?), but the advent of other mobile networks 3G support. Bear in mind that pretty much every phone company bought a 3G license at great expense, they are not going to want to write it off, so it’s only a matter of time before they start to appear. Indeed, Vodafone have already launched a 3G service, although sadly only trading on the data transfer rates for laptops.
The biggest problem for 3G at the moment, is that all the handsets are crap. Every now and again, I head on over to 3’s site, and am mightily tempted by their admittedly very competitive pricing, but then I hit the ‘phones’ page and my interest starts to wane, although the handset situation is set to change later this year, with major vendors such as Sony Ericsson adding to the 3G handset line up alongside Nokia’s rather strange stab at it. But I digress.
3G networks have the capability to transmit data at up to 384kbs through EDGE (believe it or not, this stands for Enhanced Data rates for Gsm Evolution - urgh). 384kbs. Via your mobile. All it needs is support from networks and the handsets themselves. This, I feel, is the untapped potential of 3G (and probably the untapped network management nightmare, but that’s another blog). All this doesn’t make much sense from the point of view of a mobile, with it’s shitty little speaker (or headphone output, if you are lucky), but why should 3G be limited to mobile phones? Vodaphone have already proved it doesn’t need to be, so why stop at computing devices. Getting that kind of bandwidth into cars, even vending machines (you download your song at the vending machine, and then Bluetooth it to your non-3G handset/watch/or whatever, innit?) could create a wealth of opportunities to part unsuspecting punters from their readies.
But back to online music vendors. By buying into a proprietary technology, like Microsoft’s Windows Media Audio (WMA) format with their proprietary DRM, they are also tying themselves to Windows Media Player. Now, Microsoft have yet to release a version of Windows Media Player that supports their own DRM scheme on any platform apart from Windows 2000/XP (not even their own ‘Media Center’ edition, I note), and never the quickest to get into a new game, are unlikely to. Even if they do, it’ll probably be tied to their bloatware PocketPC/Windows Mobile OSs.
This is great for Microsoft, because if people want to purchase music, they’ll have to do it from a Microsoft device, but the record labels will ultimately lose out, as not everyone has a Microsoft device, and at the moment, there aren’t even any 3G handsets that look remotely close to running a Microsoft operating system. At least Apple did well by using an open standard (AAC), although it is not Free, and they did bolt on their own proprietary DRM, but you can’t get everything right…
Using an open encoding standard levels the field for multiple vendors to provide playback devices and software, which prevents the vendor lock-in so inherent in the Microsoft model. If they would at least use an encoding/protection method created by a company willing to licence it out to third part developers, it would be a step in the right direction (think mp3 - playback is free, but encoding apps require a minimal fee, usually eaten by the app provider). It would allow more players to get into more devices used by more people, and after all, should the record labels not be using the Internet to reach a wider audience?
Of course, I realise that any deal done by the record labels for digital distribution is not likely to be exclusive at this point, but wouldn’t they be better off with some sort of coherent game plan rather than jumping on the back of the latest and greatest bandwagon that happens to be rumbling along at the time?
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