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Editorial by Gene Pitts
Owner and editor of the audiophile voice.
Microsoft has started selling music tracks for 99 cents each from its MSN Music website. Oddly, the operation started up within a very few days of my wife requesting that I change our home-page to Google from MSN.
And, no, I haven't bought any of their stock either. It's not that I think that editors are stupid about money and where to invest it. In fact, I think quite the reverse is true, even though I find myself at least somewhat "disqualified" by temperament to run the overall operations of a Big-Deal Magazine within a Big-Deal Corporation. The politics are too heavy., having to walk sideways down the office halls with my hack pressed tightly against a wall and a death-grip on my nearly unused Corporate Dagger. Not making pages doesn't make it for me.
Anyway, Microsoft is joining Apple which is supplying tracks to download via their iTunes service to their Pod, the hugely popular portable. Is there a portable (and maybe even home gear) in Microsoft's future? Maybe, and I certainly wouldn't bet against that. After all, which audio-guru would have bet five years ago, say, that Dell Computers would be selling TV monitors, true Big Screen TVs.
MSN's Corporate Vice President, Yusuf Mehdi, says the operation is about breaking even at the 99 cent price. While Apple charges the same price, you can buy tunes for 88 cents per over at www.walmart.com, and if you really want to search for the "low ball " see if RealNetworks is still offering their 49 cents a song promo rate. (Probably he over by the time you read this, but....) The cutting edge on this, at least to me, is figuring out which service is going to have the songs I want, right there, for instant down-load. Which outfit is going to cut a deal with which digital satellite radio service or streaming broadband cable or DSL for instant downloads of the tunes you just heard on that wonderful music-radio program you always listen to? After all, isn't the MP-3 Generation only about instant gratification, just as mine was, the Baby-Boomers? (I mean, why else would my belly he so large?)
MSN users can pick from about a half million tunes from the million or more that the firm has licensed so far. What's more interesting is that Microsoft has entered into arrangements to sell only entire albums (no single cuts) with some major artists including Metallica (right, the guys who sued Napster), the Dave Mathews Band, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Comcast, the service I use, offers Rhapsody, which claims to have a library of more than 750,000 songs. Their "where's the money?" model is different, too, in that you can have unlimited downloads for $25 per three-month period.
But suppose you aren't a major artist or maybe you are a major artist but your label doesn't think so, What then? Well, surprise, surprise, and if you didn't get it from the comments above, it isn't illegal to download music from the internet! Just as it isn't illegal for an unsigned band or artist to peddle their tunes on a website. No matter what the Law-Suits from the Recording Industry Association of America say they are doing, they are actually bringing people to heel in court for "unauthorized distribution" of copyrighted material.
But thank you, thank you, Jon Pareles, for pointing this out in your very fine article on websites offering free music on-line in The New York Times for Sept. 10th. Before giving us his 20 listings, plus cogent comments, Pareles writes about various performers who post hard-to-find songs on-line (hobdylan.com), various radio stations (including one of my fave's, WFMU, though he doesn't get around to my pick for "Best Station In My Area," WFUV) which offer streaming audio or downloading (classical, public radio, college, and "eclectic"), and even about the vaunted MTh which offers "an entire album each week as an audio stream." (Wonder what the RIAA thinks about that.) I will have to check out a utility program Pareles mentions, Stepvoice, for recording streaming audio. Go buy the Times hack issue for his helpful and insightful comments, which starts on the front page of the Weekend section(!), hut let me give you my selection from his list: epitonic.com for indie hand recordings, furthurnet.com which started with the Dead but now includes such as Phish and Gov't Mule, Folkways Records at folkways.si.edu (perhaps the first label I was aware of as a separate label), Internet Archive at archive.org which was new to me hut has the hugely ambitious goal of "preserving material that might otherwise disappear from the Internet," and CNet's techies give us music.download.com from which Pareles lauds their Editor's Picks.
Is it trivial to point out that these sites are more labors of love than occupations? No more than it would be to point out that most musical instruments are not played by professional musicians. Someone once asked me if I played the Taylor guitar that now mostly sits in my listening room. I replied, "No, I can only play my audio system acceptably well these days."
