Geekfishing Blog

Music Downloads

Been investigating music download services. Here's what I've learned so far judging by a Google search on Music Download, here are the top listed services

MP3.com

The top site, a bunch of free MP3 downloads. Linkin Park for instance. Pretty amazing, I'm not sure I understand the revenue model. These look like unprotected MP3's to me. Looks like mainly new artists to me. The Day I Die by the way is a pretty good track. Fun perusing.

EMusic. This looks like the subscription part of MP3.com. Says they have 20,000 albums, but not the primary ones. No limits after download. These are just pure MP3s. 40 downloads per month for $9.99/month. Can't believe this is too popular, but interesting to see. Really too bad that it requires a credit card before you do anything. They use the classic trick of wait two weeks and then start billing, billing, billing.

Musicmatch Downloads.

This is $0.99 per track or $9.99 per album. Have a bunch of kind of hard to understand limitations that basically mean you can only use it on your PC because it is protected with Windows Media format. Other not so great thing is that a credit card is required before you can even preview:

• Tracks are encoded at CD quality in 160kbps Windows Media, and include the cover art from the original album.
• Tracks will automatically be added into your Musicmatch Jukebox library once they are finished downloading. You can play them in Musicmatch Jukebox just like your mp3 files.
• You may play your tracks on up to 3 PCs at the same time.
• Tracks can be burned to CDs, but the same playlist may only be burned up to five times. I'm not quite sure I understand what this means exactly, can you juggle orders more than five times, does this mean you can only burn with MusicMatch
• You may play tracks on digital music players that support secure Windows Media. There aren't many that do. Basically, Creative, Rio and Diamond players.

Apple iTunes

It is easy to see why this service is so popular when you look at what else is out there. First they have a dedicated player (like Musicmatch), it autosyncs with iPods, so you don't spend your whole life trying to figure out what is where. The iPod and your PC have the same music (they can do this because of the big disk sizes).

Also, they are right on in payment methods. Most folks who want music don't have credit cards and there is no way a parent is going to give kids an unlimited credit card access. So they have gift certificates and stored value (the equivalent of prepay on cell phones). Also, they don't have a monthly subscription (unlike Rhapsody, but like Musicmatch).

Pretty standard user interface, but much cleaner since it is a client application. They have previews, related and special content, so the usual stuff. They did a nice job on search with relevance scoring, although it's interesting a search for "Madonna" turns up some obscure track from the lady of Detroit and then the next hit is Do it with Madonna by the Androids :-) Otherwise, it has got to be one of the best searches around.

The cool thing is that the main user interface is a database like screen where you can search and double click gets you to a preview immediately. The search corrects misspellings too a la google. They also do a good job on exclusive content.

Posted by rich at October 16, 2003 10:42 PM | TrackBack