Digital Music 2004
Published December 01, 2003
Bob Tedeschi looks at the digital music prospects for the coming year:
- COMING to a music download store in 2004: Yo-Yo Ma's Shostakovich Quartet No. 15 and Bob Dylan's second show at Amsterdam.
So go the predictions of some music industry executives, who say that as music labels and retailers compete more aggressively online, they will offer more obscure titles and recordings of live performances that could find a paying audience through downloads but make no financial sense to distribute on CD's.
This is but one of a handful of trends likely to emerge next year in the paid digital download arena, industry executives said. With hundreds of millions of investment and marketing dollars flowing into the sector, it could be the most active online commerce category. And with the activity comes a risk that it could resemble the Internet bubble of 1999, though on a smaller scale.
The first area of resemblance, analysts and executives predict, will be in the sheer number of online music stores that sell downloads, which will continue to build through the early part of next year, only to contract beneath the weight of excessive marketing spending and slim profit margins.
....In addition to Apple's iTunes, RealNetworks' Rhapsody, Napster of Roxio, MusicMatch, BuyMusic.com, BestBuy and others, online music stores from several other companies are expected to start in the coming weeks and months. JupiterMedia, a technology research firm, predicts digital music downloads will be a $1.1 billion marketplace next year and $3.2 billion in 2008. According to Nielsen SoundScan, the biggest paid download sites sold $3.2 million worth of individual tracks in October alone, more than double the number sold in July.
....Sean Ryan, vice president for music services at RealNetworks, expects the services next year to include some form of subscription download service. Such an offering, he said, would combine the flexibility of the so-called streaming services - where users listen to unlimited numbers of songs on demand, but cannot download them - and the portability of downloaded tracks.
- Digital Music 2004
- Published: December 01, 2003
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- Section: Sci/Tech
- Filed Under: Sci/Tech: Internet, Music: News
- Writer: Eric Olsen
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I persoanlly would be interested in the "renting" service from the volume angle. If the monthly service charge is reasonable, then if could be a great deal to get thousands of songs on a month to month basis. I could "buy" the ones I want most via CD (most likely) or digitally. But I really want that package and the artwork and the liner notes, etc.
The all you can eat renting system, as long as you can move the songs around and the selection keeps growing as they say it will, would seem to answer a lot of the digital issues for me: price per unit, portablility, high quality, selection. I get my faves in hardcopy to ge tthe artwork, etc.
I was subscribing to both Napster and Rhapsody but just cancelled Napster. I have written here before, but the rent system for having the huge library of music on an external server is well worth 10 bones a month.
BTW, a technicality here, but Best Buy doesn't have its own system, it uses the listen.com Rhapsody system like others do, so the quoted article has one slight error.
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He's certainly right about spending $10k filling up your digital jukebox.
Personally, though, I don't want to rent music. I might pay for a streaming on demand service, and I already pay to download permanent copies. The only important remaining variables are price, followed by the ability to download artwork and liner notes.