I know everyone thinks MP3 downloads are the coolest thing since disco biscuits but save your money - don't buy one of those waaay over-priced Rio MP3 players. MP3 will soon be dead anyway - replaced by streaming.
June 21 2000
Just compare the pluses and minuses for downloading music vs. streaming music. To enjoy MP3s you have to go to a site, find the music you want, start the download, wait until it's finished, move the file to your MP3 player or burn a CD and copy it to your other computers or wherever you think you're going to play it from. Then you can listen - after quite a bit of work. Soon the record companies are going to make you pay for any MP3 downloads that are any good, so what's the big deal? All this downloading and CD burning stuff is too much hassle. With streaming all you have to do is find the music and click. It starts playing almost instantly.
Another problem with MP3 is that most of the music is from unsigned bands - they're just about the only ones willing to let you have their music for free. They're having trouble giving it away so why not? What have they got to lose? It's a very good idea and with a bit of luck the way bands are promoted and compensated will be changed as a result of the MP3 download phenomena that we are experiencing today.
But the most popular music - the mainstream stuff - is never going to be free if you're getting it legally. The streaming sites are now playing the big names. Legally. The MP3 sites have stuff you've never heard of for the most part. Some of it's great but you have to kiss a lot of toads to get to the good stuff. If you're downloading the latest music, say the new Santana album, from Web sites or using Napsterish tools you're almost certainly doing it illegally. And you know that by listening to it you're going to go to hell and that makes it kind of hard to enjoy. Doesn't it?
Then there's the quality issue. Streamed music is medium quality if you're either a super hi-fi anorak or you haven't tried it lately. The latest players are incorporating SRS technology and are sounding pretty good. Yeah, the high highs and low lows aren't all there but I rarely get to crank things up loud enough to hear it that well anyway. Streaming players are now available built into home stereos and in-car players are on the horizon. If you have a high bandwidth connection you can enjoy superb-quality streamed music today that even high fidelity geeks would appreciate.
When my brother and I were young fellers we fantasised about having a little cube we could carry around that had all the music in the world on it so we could listen to anything we wanted wherever we happened to be. This was in the days when a big hard drive was about 20MB or so, so you know we must have been on another planet to think such a thing would work. Storage technology has blasted off since then but you still can't store all the music in the world on a little cube you can carry around in your pocket. We were thinking ahead of our time and our wild ideas went as far as to imagine streaming all the music in the world from a central server, but we figured it wouldn't happen until the next century sometime. Quite a long way off to our young minds.
And that time has come.
Streaming's pretty much like radio but with thousands of channels instead of just one like from a terrestrial radio station. If you go to one of the popular music streaming Web sites you can pick from hundreds of playlists and with a mouse-click you can listen for hours. It's easy, it's instant and you can pick from thousands of mainstream or speciality genre play lists. MP3 downloads are comparatively awkward. Streaming is just plain old easier. If you can go to a site and stream any music you want to hear why would you need to download it? The only good reason to actually possess music on disks or Rio players or whatever is so you can carry it around with you and listen to it at work, in your car, at home or at a friend's house. But suppose you could set up any old play lists you like on a Web site and listen to them from wherever you happened to be? You wouldn't need to have the music on some little silver disk or anything. You wouldn't need to own it anymore.
Suppose you could go to a MSP (Music Service Provider) site, browse through a huge database of music and make your own play lists? You could set up a play list with Stairway to Heaven 10 times in a row followed by the live version of Cream doing Crossroads four times followed by American Woman six times in a row. Set it to loop over and over again all night. Save that and call it 'My Afternoon Boogie Music'. Anytime thereafter when you're in the mood you can just go to that site, click on your play list and the choices you made will stream on down one after another. No downloading, no burning CDs, just listening. Set up some play lists with mellow stuff for listening to first thing in the morning and a couple of other play lists for wild-assed parties. Of course you could listen to any of the play lists that have already been set up by musical gurus you know and love (DJs they used to be called). The technology to do this is already in place - we just need to sort the rights issues out and that part's almost done too. Actually there's a site in Israel doing all this right now but they're illegal and will be going to hell when they die if not before. You will too if you go to their site so don't try to find it!
If you've been to WWW.com, Spinner or any of the other net radio sites, you know there is a wealth of brand-name music already out there you can listen to - legally too, BTW. Once programmers realise you don't have to be a radio station to do this and sites like WWW.com start building some imaginative play lists, the MP3 download phenomena is going to look about as cool as hula hoops.
Now about the music-should-be-free issue. Music should be free. So should food, sex, great vacations in Hawaii, and great wines but it isn't and it won't ever be. Get used to it. The record companies with enthusiastic support from artists are going to find technical ways to interfere with and block free downloads of their legitimately copyrighted material. The music pirates will try to stay one step ahead of them. Coming from a family rich in musicians I can understand wanting to get paid for your work - musicians need to feed their families, buy houses, go on holiday, go out to restaurants and all the other fun stuff we all like to do. They need to get paid. So Napster-like things are going to die or morph into something that gets money to the artists or full-time musicians are going to disappear. Let's move on.
How is streaming music going to be any different about getting money to the artists? In the first place the record companies and artists like streaming because it's similar to traditional broadcast and so relatively easy to understand. Also it's easy to measure streams and figure out exactly which songs were heard by how many people in which countries. The big streaming outfits are making deals with the music copyright collection organisations as fast as they can so they can have near all the music you might ever want to hear encoded and ready for you to add to one of your personal play lists.
Of course the money is going to have to come from people willing to pay a bit to hear premium stuff, say the new Madonna album, or we're going to have to listen to a few ads. If the 'listen to a few ads' bit gets out of hand then this new medium will suck just like radio sucks. The more likely scenario is some sort of subscription model. When you sign up for cable TV you have a choice of channels you can receive - if you go for all the cool movie channels, sports channels, Playboy and other channels you're going to have a pretty high monthly bill. But you can get the basic channels for only a small high monthly bill. Access to music could be handled the same way. Say for £10 a month you get access to a huge current catalogue of music from almost all the labels - hundreds of thousands of songs. For a £5 per month supplement you get access to back catalogues, for another £5 per month you get all the new releases as soon as they come out, etc., etc. - you get the idea. I'm not a starving student so a reasonable subscription fee appeals to me.
I'm too busy to mess about with downloads and all the associated copying and storing and such. I want to pick just the music I want to hear and occasionally I'll be willing to check out what someone I respect recommends. With wireless devices and phone systems like DoCoMo the client end of things will soon be sorted. Streaming is the easiest way to distribute ever devised by man. Downloading is an awkward mess.
Just compare the pluses and minuses for downloading music vs. streaming music. To enjoy MP3s you have to go to a site, find the music you want, start the download, wait until it's finished, move the file to your MP3 player or burn a CD and copy it to your other computers or wherever you think you're going to play it from. Then you can listen - after quite a bit of work. Soon the record companies are going to make you pay for any MP3 downloads that are any good, so what's the big deal? All this downloading and CD burning stuff is too much hassle. With streaming all you have to do is find the music and click. It starts playing almost instantly.
