Internet music takes a step up

The Big 5 record labels add their voices to the quest for the Celestial Jukebox

08/22/2002

By DOUG BEDELL / The Dallas Morning News

When the history of Internet music is written, Listen.com's Rhapsody subscription service may merit its own chapter.

The service is the first to offer music from all Big Five record labels, meaning that subscribers find far fewer holes in artist selections than they did with previous plans.

And it reflects a change of attitude toward online licensing in an industry grappling with declining CD sales and undaunted trading on KaZaA, Morpheus and other renegade networks.

To be sure, Rhapsody's current $9.95-per-month streaming-only service is still a long way from becoming the "Celestial Jukebox" – a digital vehicle that allows music lovers to effortlessly grab any recording they want whenever they desire.

But a test-drive of Rhapsody on a broadband Internet connection gives a tantalizing taste of how the digital music scene might some day provide consumer-friendly, legal alternatives to the post-Napster networks.

Warming up

"The record companies are beginning to experiment more," Rhapsody spokesman Matt Graves says. "I think they realize they need to put more music out there at a better price point and with fewer restrictions."

The base price for Rhapsody's "All Access" package allows users unlimited access to more than 200,000 music tracks. Rhapsody has encoded about 16,000 albums from the Big Five – Sony, Vivendi Universal, EMI, BMG and Warner.

The Windows Media streams are produced in high-quality 128 kbps encoding, which rivals CD sound on fast Internet connections. On dial-up modems, the 20 kbps encoding sounds more like AM radio.

A simple download sets up the Rhapsody player – a clean, easy-to-use interface that can be accessed on as many Windows-based computers as desired. No Macintosh version is currently offered. On a cable modem, the music arrives instantaneously. There's no waiting for buffering, and the operation rarely encounters hiccups.

Music on demand

Listen.com allows users to search and select "on-demand" tracks that can be saved to playlists. Entire albums from a single artist can be compiled effortlessly.

Users can also assemble their own custom stations with Radio Plus by plugging in the names of up to 10 artists. The service automatically builds a streaming station that adds in similar artists. It is in this realm that Rhapsody really shines.

In its first incarnation in 1999, Listen.com was a directory of legally available music on the Web. It specialized in helping fans find more of what they were looking for, even if they were woefully unenlightened.

In those first days, teams of music experts spent hours matching artists with genres and tracks to tastes. The resulting database allows Rhapsody to predict what fans of a particular artist may also like to hear.

The current Rhapsody 1.5 version uses its past to build a future. As a user's preferences are revealed in a Radio Plus station, the service serves up a smorgasbord that is surprisingly on target. When it's not, users can skip forward with the click of a mouse.

Album art, links to artist home pages and samples of tunes flash onto the screen. In effect, Rhapsody provides an instant education that can expand a music lover's horizons. And the breadth of its streams surpasses offerings of similar, more limited services, such as the $4.95-a-month MusicMatch Radio.

Fans first

"It's very much built from a music fan's point of view," Mr. Graves says. "It was built by an editorial team that is passionate about music and extremely dedicated at figuring out primary ways to identify a musician."

For the truly clueless, Radio Plus can also access more than 50 preprogrammed stations categorized by music type.

Listen.com launched the service in December with four of the Big Five labels under its wing. In July, it signed a deal with holdout Universal, the largest label whose hottest artists include Eminem, U2 and Nelly. But that does not prevent some serious gaps in the available selection.

Searching for some major artists, including must-haves such as the Beatles, pulls up nothing. That's because those musicians have retained digital rights to their works, forcing Listen.com and other services to negotiate with them individually.

Subscribers to MusicNet and Pressplay – two online music subscription services run by the Big Five – have even more gaps in their selections and are much less upfront with subscribers. Rhapsody at least gives searchers the reason an artist's work is unavailable.

"We want people to understand that it's not that Listen doesn't want you to have that music, but that it's a rights issue and we're working through it," Mr. Graves says.

Portability

If services such as Rhapsody are to compete with free file-sharing, they must offer "portability" – the ability to download tunes to CDs or move them to music players, analysts say. For now, Listen.com's portability is limited to its classical music catalog from the Naxos label. For $10 more a month, users can stream up to 10 tracks a month onto a CD in standard WAV format.

Mr. Graves says Rhapsody's 2.0 version, to be launched this fall, will expand CD-burning capabilities at an added cost.

The Big Five are gradually loosening restrictions on Net downloads.

Universal and Warner Music recently said they will add portability to their catalogs on eMusic.com and Full Audio's MusicNow subscription services.

Rhapsody is in line to cut similar deals, Mr. Graves says.

Until then, Listen.com's vision of the Celestial Jukebox will remain elusive. And, say industry analysts, music fans may be hard to lure away from free file-sharing programs.

"Music doesn't have to be free, but it should feel free," Mr. Graves says. "If you put it out there at an affordable price in a way that makes it fun to explore and learn more about music, people will pay.

"Ten dollars, after all, is the cost of a beer and a burger."

E-mail dbedell@dallasnews.com