Lasse Penttinen
6 Jan 2003 11:11
Mercury News has posted an interesting article about Sony's and Universal's commercial streaming service. It seems that there is quite a bit of doubt concerning the success of this kind of a business model.
Personally I think that if an online service would sell the music with reasonable pricing and in high sound quality, it might have plenty of potential customers. If you would get a commercial quality service with a fair pricetag, why bother hunting the files with P2P software?
2002 will be remembered as the year the recording industry showed it could sue and sell at the same time.
After trying only to shut down peer-to-peer networks on which their music is pirated, like the late Napster and its robust offspring Kazaa and LimeWire, the major labels have finally begun to compete with them.
Not all that successfully -- at least not yet. No one said that coaxing people to pay for what they can readily steal would be easy. Some analysts predict it will be futile.
But give them credit for the belated effort. The major labels have transferred much of their catalogs to the Internet. They have built a model, based on paid subscriptions, that they hope eventually will lure a generation of consumers who, by the labels' own fault, have come to view free music as a birthright.
Take the latest version of Pressplay, a joint venture of Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group. It has the basic features that music buyers have been demanding: one site where you can go to play and buy individual tunes from all of the major labels. Beginning at $10 a month, you're offered unlimited access to listen to and to download whatever you want from thousands of tunes. The tunes will be playable on your computer as long as you pay the subscription.
If you want to transfer a favorite song to a portable player or burn a copy to make your own CD, you can do that, too, at $1 per song. Competing sites, like Listen.com and MusicNet, have or have announced similar services.
Mercury News