response 31 of 143:

Apr 6 06:14 UTC 2001

There's a raft of articles and I'm not coming up with a good synthesis.
Some time back the Universal and Sony labels announced that they would
offer a subscription plan called Duet, and this week it was announced
that Yahoo will become a part of this project.  Details are scanty,
and the articles I've seen indicated that the files will come with 
"digital rights management" encumbrances to inhibit trading and 
loading in portable MP3 players.  
 
Monday's announcement was that BMG, EMI and AOL-Time-Warner are going 
to do a partnership with Real Networks to form a subscription service
called MusicNet.   The article in NewMediaMusic.com said that 
MusicNet would be offering Mp3 downloads, but I'm not sure that's 
a reliable report.  MusicNet had the air of having been thrown together
in a big hurry so that, in last Tuesday's congressional hearings, 
the industry could claim to be moving forward in offering music
on the Internet. 

But I think the major labels have decided that they need to have something
which looks sort of like Napster in place when Napster-as-we-know-it 
comes to an end this summer.  Users with some technical sophistication
will probably continue on with underground Napster clones or Gnutella,
but millions of Napster users aren't too sophisticated and the record
companies need to have something to offer them by, say, July.

So, all five of the majors have signed up for one service or another; 
the indies are so far out in the cold, and also left out in the cold are 
today's music retailers, who are starting to scream very loudly.
Also apparently out in the cold are the holders of the music publishing
copyrights; the blurb in Inside.com says the proposed subscription 
services are not dealing with the concerns of those copyright holders.
Unfortunately inside.com isn't offering much content for free any more,
so I haven't been able to read the details.

There was another story in today's news: MTV has concluded a deal to 
sell song and album downloads -- priced individually, rather than in 
a subscription service as described above -- from all five labels.
This is the first time anyone has been able to offer "one-stop shopping,"
and of course the indies are left out again.

Things are moving very fast, and my picture of what's happening is murky.