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Personal Tech

Digital music users facing choices, not compatibility

You can forget one-stop shopping in this ever-changing and often confusing realm. Now, even more paired-off products are coming.

By Washington Post
Published October 30, 2006

Ah, progress. It used to be that you just went out and bought a compact disc and you didn't have to worry about whether it would work on your player.

These days, in the age of digital distribution, we don't need to buy CDs. What we have are a bunch of online music services, offering songs for sale or rent via quick download to a bunch of digital music players that might or might not play them.

Take music fan Chauncey Canfield: He has a whopping 180-gigabyte music collection, an iPod and a smartphone he can fill with songs from his subscription Yahoo Music account. But he can't put Yahoo Music songs on his iPod, and he can't put songs bought from the iTunes Music Store on his phone.

Canfield knows iTunes is the most popular online music store, but he avoids it because of the playback restrictions. Instead, he prefers to shop at eMusic, which sells its tracks in the MP3 format, an open technology that works on every music player on the market. Even the iPod.

"The fact that they don't have (antipiracy controls) on them is absolutely a major plus," he said. "I don't have to segregate my music into various ghettos."

Thanks to competing file formats and business models, the digital music world can be a little confusing - and it's about to get more so.

This holiday season, Microsoft and RealNetworks are bringing offerings to the market in an attempt to unseat Apple Computer, the king of the digital music world. The companies are offering a pair of devices and services that are tethered to each other in the same way Apple's iPod is tethered to the company's iTunes service.

Microsoft's $249 Zune will play songs sold from the company's coming Zune Marketplace store. RealNetworks has teamed with retailer Best Buy and memory-card maker SanDisk to offer a device that will work with such subscription programs as RealNetworks' Rhapsody service. The device, called a Sansa player, costs from $139.99 to $249.99; subscriptions to the service cost $15 per month. Both will play MP3 files, as does Apple's iPod and most other digital players.

It is too early to say whether these devices will affect sales of the world's most successful player - the iPod, which celebrated its fifth birthday this month. But the would-be rivals will be following the same strategy Apple has used with the iPod: The software, programs and services that will supply music to the Zune and Sansa players are incompatible with one another.

And neither player will work with the iTunes Music Store, the service that holds the biggest chunk of the legal music-download market.

Other gadgetmakers would love to sell devices that play iTunes tracks, but Apple has declined to open the system to them. Other music services would love to offer iPod-compatible tracks, but they can't, for the same reason. The iPod and the iTunes store are connected to each other in what is called a "closed" or "end-to-end" system.

Top online music stores

Computer requirements: Mac/ Windows

iTunes

Launched: April 2003

File format: AAC

Songs in library: More than 3.5-million

Monthly rental options: None

Cost to own: 99 cents per song

Market share (by units sold in August): 70 percent

eMusic

Launched: August 1998

File format: MP3

Songs: More than 1.7-million

Monthly rental options: None

Cost to own: Starts at $10 for 40 songs a month

Market share: 10 percent

Computer requirements: Windows

Rhapsody

Launched: December 2001

File format: WMA, RealAudio

Songs: More than 2.7-million

Monthly rental options: $14.99

Cost to own: 99 cents per song

Market share: 4 percent

Napster

Launched: November 2003

File format: WMA

Songs: More than 2-million

Monthly rental options: $14.95

Cost to own: 99 cents per song

Market share: 4 percent

Yahoo Music

Launched: March 2005

File format: WMA

Songs: More than 2-million

Monthly rental options: $9.99 to $11.99

Cost to own: 99 cents per song

Market share: Less than 7 percent, combined with Urge

Urge

Launched: May

File format: WMA

Songs: More than 2-million

Monthly rental options: $14.95

Cost to own: 99 cents per song

Market share: Less than 7 percent, combined with Yahoo! Music

Sources: The companies, NPD Group

[Last modified October 31, 2006, 08:43:26]