ecently, more than a few music fans who were diehard advocates of swapping songs illegally through Napster and its clones have found themselves doing something they never would have predicted: subscribing to Internet services that abide by copyright laws and paying for the music they download.
These fans once scoffed at the attempts by the record industry and others to create such subscription services, in which users pay monthly fees for access to large online music libraries. Now they are joining them.
"I've been walking around for a month at least saying that I'm impressed by Rhapsody," said Ian Rogers, referring to a subscription service for which he pays $9.95 a month. Last year Mr. Rogers, an Internet and music consultant who has worked on both sides of the business (for the technology company Nullsoft and for the Beastie Boys), distributed on the Internet a scathing condemnation of the industry's subscription services.
But recently he said: "The selection has finally reached a threshold I'm happy with, and the interface is good now. With other services before, there was a bad selection of songs, they were of bad quality, and they were hard to get to."
Just six months ago, this sort of talk would have been unthinkable, downright apostasy, among those who consider the giant recording conglomerates the bane of free-wheeling musical access and innovation. Even those who have been won over are usually still skeptical of the power of the big corporations. And there are still plenty of fans who think the subscription sites are inferior, doomed to fail and maybe even intended to do so by their corporate sponsors.
But now, largely because of tough actions by the record companies to combat free music sites through the courts, legislation and even through techno-guerrilla tactics, there is a noticeable change of sentiment in a small segment of the downloading cognoscenti. Though their numbers are low, many are the early adapters who spot a trend first.
"File sharing has become such a dreadful experience," said Brad Hill, who writes books and articles about digital music, referring to the illicit music-swapping sites. He now subscribes to EMusic, a site owned by Vivendi Universal where thousands of songs released mostly on independent labels can be captured without restrictions on the number of downloads allowed each month and what users can do with them. "I just can't say enough about it," he said. "I get at least 30 albums a month or so at 10 bucks a month. That's 10 cents each."
There are two main methods for obtaining music online: peer-to-peer file-sharing programs and legal subscription services. Peer-to-peer programs allow users to scan the music from the hard drives of other fans logged on to the service. From their start, Napster and subsequent sites like Kazaa (which also features films and computer programs) and Audiogalaxy (which was an easy-to-use music-only application) were simply interfaces between the computers of the millions of users logged on at any one time.
With subscription services, the music is collected in the service's database, and users simply retrieve it. While peer-to-peer services seem anarchic — they are free, and it is nearly impossible to control and determine what is being exchanged — subscription services are quite orderly. Subscribers pay a fee, and they can obtain only music that has been secured and uploaded by the subscription company. Currently, however, anarchic services have hundreds of thousands of users, while the orderly ones say they have tens of thousands.
The shift away from peer-to-peer services and toward pay subscription sites like EMusic and Rhapsody is a result of two coinciding developments in the online music world. First, the music industry's crusade to disable illegitimate file-sharing services has won significant victories. In recent months some programs, like Audiogalaxy, have buckled under pressure from lawsuits and stopped allowing copyrighted songs to be traded without authorization.
"If Audiogalaxy was in full form like it was six months or a year ago, it would have been hard to beat that," admitted Sean Ryan, the president and chief executive of Rhapsody, which is owned by the Internet music company Listen.com.
Other file-sharing services, like Kazaa, which come with pesky built-in pop-up advertising programs, have become unreliable and full of phony files, thanks largely to slyly intrusive actions by agents for the musicians or record labels. A downloaded file titled as an Eminem song, for example, could be a virus, another song entirely or perhaps even a repeating loop of the Eminem song. These loops are posted by new businesses like Overpeer, which are hired by the record companies to post phony tracks to discourage file-swapping. No companies or artist representatives, however, admit to planting viruses, which they say are the work of individual saboteurs.
At the same time, Internet radio stations have fast been disappearing because of new copyright laws, lobbied for by the record industry, requiring that broadcasters pay royalties on the music they play. In October, Web broadcasters, whether lone teenagers or the Web sites of actual radio stations, will be required to make retroactive payments for all songs they have played in the last four years, a nearly impossible demand for the thousands of young fans running Internet stations for fun out of their bedrooms or dorm rooms. Meanwhile, several subscription services have been improving their appeal.
Music fans have complained about the major-label subscription companies MusicNet (a joint venture of Real Networks, AOL Time Warner, Bertelsmann and EMI Group) and Pressplay (owned by Universal and Sony), which have many restrictions on downloading and listening. These services offer music for a monthly fee, but subscribers are allowed to retrieve only a limited number of songs. The services place many limitations on transferring the songs onto portable players and CD's, and, in the case of MusicNet, the songs may be kept on your hard drive for only a month.
But now there are other options: EMusic, possibly the most popular music-subscription service (60,000 registered users), offers unlimited and unrestricted access. The downloads are fast, the audio is of good quality, there is no waiting, and most important, the odds of ending up with a virus that will destroy a teenager's homework folder are next to none. But because EMusic places no restrictions on the songs, major labels — even Universal, whose corporate parent owns it — have been reluctant to license their music. Working around this, EMusic is trying to attract fans of specific independent labels and niche genres, like electronic dance music and punk.
