AOL has launched its first subscription based online music service.
The shutting down of Napster, and the publicity it generated, heralded the birth of free music sharing en mass. As the law gunned down the first major music-sharing site, many other mavericks were created. Indeed, far more people use KaZaA, the largest file-sharing service, than ever used Napster.
As sales of CDs continue to fall – they declined by 9% in 2002 – record companies are desperate to find a way of making downloadable music pay for them. Equally keen to strike up what they see as potentially lucrative joint ventures are ISPs such as AOL.
America Online now offers its first online music service to its 27 million members, carefully matching its pricing with other paid music services that already exist. Most services charge around $10 a month and, through AOL, customers can listen to around 250,000 different songs online.
AOL offers an unlimited number of tethered downloads, where songs can be copied onto a computer and played offline but a subscriber cannot copy the files to other devices or send them to other people. The ideal solution for record companies would be for all downloadable music to only be available in this format.
However, AOL also allows customers to pay $1 to download an untethered song, which could be copied onto a CD or converted to MP3 format. Once in these formats, the downloaded music can still be shared, copied and put on free sites.
The music industry has dubbed downloading free music as stealing but file-sharing services like KaZaA are now so widely accepted as a quick, cheap and convenient way to download any media, that it will be extremely hard to lure people away from the file-sharing services they are used to.
The consumer has been at the mercy of the music industry’s pricing policy for years. People now know that the manufacture of a CD costs less than a dollar and it seems the tables have finally turned. Any music industry/ISP joint venture will have to provide an exceptional service and give people a reason to pay for music they can already get for free.
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