Give the gift of music

TechTalk
By Ken Doyle

The battle for digital music distribution rages on. On the left, "illegal" file-swapping services Kazaa and Limewire offer seemingly limitless downloads of hard-to-find music. On the right, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is obtaining private Internet access records, without court orders, as evidence in its lawsuits against the estimated 60 million Americans who use file-swapping services.
Legality aside, it’s hard to argue with the central issue: music lovers are tired of paying $18 for a CD with one or two good tracks on it. The music distribution system has been fundamentally flawed for some time, a fact that the RIAA refused to acknowledge until recently.

Legitimate alternatives to fileswapping mushroomed over the past two years, but most were hampered by poor selection, clunky interfaces, and restrictive copyright agreements. The leaders in the field were subscription-based: you paid a flat fee per month to “rent” songs that you downloaded, but in many cases you couldn’t burn music to a CD or play it on portable music players.

All that changed when the iTunes Music Store (ITMS; www.apple.com/itunes) opened its virtual doors to Mac users in April and sold over a million tracks in its first week of operation. In October, the service--which earned Time magazine’s “Coolest Invention of 2003” award--became available to Windows users as well. Accessed through the elegantly simple iTunes software, the ITMS offers downloads of individual tracks for 99 cents each, as well as entire albums for $9.99. Best of all, you can listen to 30-second samples of any track before spending a penny. Purchased music can be used on up to three computers, burned to CD, or downloaded to Apple’s iPod music player. Setting up an account with a major credit card takes less than a minute after installing iTunes. The ITMS also lets parents set up allowances for their kids, and enables users to send and redeem gift certificates.

Competitors to the ITMS abound, but few are worthy of mention. One Windows-only equivalent is Napster 2.0 (www.napster.com)--a reborn, legal version of the pioneering file-swapping service that was shut down by an RIAA lawsuit. Napster has a broader selection of music than the ITMS, and gives you a choice of either a subscription-based service or individual downloads for 99 cents. However, Napster lets you use purchased music on one computer only.

If you’d rather just listen to music online without downloading it, Rhapsody (www.listen.com) is worth checking out. It’s another subscription-based service with a $9.95 monthly plan that lets you listen to an unlimited amount of streamed music. You can also purchase tracks and burn them to a CD for 79 cents each. The details of the service are a little confusing, however, and the Rhapsody player sports a more cluttered interface than iTunes.

If you’re still recovering from holiday shopping, now’s the time to take a break and go online. Best wishes for a happy and musical 2004!