For all the glitz surrounding the unveiling Monday of Apple
Computer’s new music service, a quick look suggests that it’s a solid,
but hardly revolutionary, addition to the market.
The company has certainly put on display its experience with ease of use. Apple’s new online service
lets Macintosh owners buy digital downloads of songs from a vast catalog
of major-label music for 99 cents apiece, with a one-click purchase
process similar to Amazon.com’s. And the songs, which can be burned to
CDs, transferred to iPod MP3 players or moved to three different
computers, have fewer restrictions on their use than do downloads from
rival music services.
The integration between the one-click purchase service, Apple’s
iTunes music jukebox software and the iPod player goes well beyond what
any other music service has done. It will genuinely make paying for
music online easy, even an impulse buy, and artists and music labels
see that as a big step forward.
“History proves that what works is the simplest, most intuitive
thing,” said recording artist Seal, who was on hand for the unveiling.
“Technology is only a good idea if it helps you. As soon as it starts
taking time out of your day, that technology is bad technology.”
Apple spent much of Monday touting the new service’s simplicity,
along with the relative lack of restrictions on the music compared with
those found with rival offerings–subscription services such as
Pressplay, MusicNet and Listen.com’s Rhapsody. CEO Steve Jobs even went
so far as to say those services treated their subscribers like
“criminals,” by locking down music against the threat of unauthorized
copying.
But what Jobs didn’t note is the debt he owes to those services and
to the defunct music companies that came before them, which have spent
years in painful negotiations with the record companies, progressively
winning more flexibility for online music distribution. Apple’s service
may be the least restrictive of the current services, but that’s
largely because other companies did the hard work of preparing the way.
Indeed, the restrictions that other services have placed on their
music–songs that disappear when subscriptions run out; the inability
to transfer downloaded files to MP3 players; and the whole concept of
“tethered” downloads, or songs that are locked to a single PC–came not
from the mysterious blindness of a generation of Net entrepreneurs, but
from strict rules imposed by the record labels and music publishers.
In the course of 18 months, the music labels have slowly relaxed
some of those restrictions. CD burning has emerged on all the major
services. Transfer to portable devices, or at least to some models, is
now possible. Apple’s service marks the next step beyond what labels
have granted to the previous services.
“A small subset of consumers”
Label executives privately say
the Apple service is an experiment, which could be expanded if it
proves successful. Apple’s small market share means that the stakes are
relatively low. “It’s a test, with a small subset of consumers,” one
label executive said.
Apple essentially used two features to persuade the labels to give
the company the benefit of the doubt. The ease of purchasing music was
a draw. So was the light, almost invisible layer of digital rights
management software that Apple built in-house and applied to the songs.
Dubbed Fairplay, the rights-management software lies on top of
Apple’s iTunes and QuickTime software, and performs tasks such as counting how many computers the songs can be
played on. Apple executives declined to discuss whether the software
could be used for other media, such as providing protection for
QuickTime-based downloads for video-on-demand services. QuickTime has
previously been left out of movie-download services such as Movielink
because of its lack of strong copy protection.
As Apple moves its service to the PC platform, which it said would
happen later this year, the rights-management issue could set up more
industry tension. Microsoft has dominated that platform with its
Windows Media rights-management tools, while QuickTime has been used
largely for unprotected works.
Other music services welcomed Apple’s marketing muscle to the
business and said they were eager to win the same rights that Jobs
touted.
“I believe the rights will be offered to us before Apple moves to
the PC,” said Rob Reid, chairman of Listen.com, the company that offers
the Rhapsody subscription service. “The labels’ natural instinct will
be to offer it to (their affiliate PC-based services) MusicNet and
Pressplay, and we usually maintain parity with them.”
Rivals weren’t convinced Apple’s pay-per-song model marked any
improvements in music distribution. Some noted that a mix of services
would likely be more successful and that Apple might ultimately be
overshadowed by other companies with more music retail experience.
“A lot of people are going to fight not only to keep up with Apple,
but to surpass them,” said Zack Zalon, general manager of Radio Free
Virgin, the online radio service of music retailer Virgin
Entertainment. “They’re an excellent software company, not a music
retailer.”
Source: CNET News.com
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