No more excuses

It took nearly a year, but pressplay, the online music venture from Sony and Universal, has finally secured rights to music from all five major record labels. If Universal's ownership of EMusic gives them any rights to their predominantly indie catalog, they could be a long way to actually having the content that consumers want to download. Except that some major artists still haven't released their songs for this service, or competitors MusicNet and Rhapsody.

But the fact remains that one of the bigger obstacles for the "legit" music services has been hurdled. Now we're getting to the real game. If web-surfers continue to shun pressplay in favor of freebies like KaZaA and LimeWire, the interesting question will by why. Obviously, free vs. not is an issue, but I've always contended that there is a price point that will work. The other factors that will have to be looked at are format (Windows Media vs. MP3), portability, and ownership. The last one is probably the biggest strike against the big boys, as they're effectively "renting" files to you while you pay a subscription. Digital Rights Management schemes are still particularly unwieldy, providing far too much friction for these services to really go mainstream. It's also the root cause for the other two issues, and the one that the major labels are going to cling to for dear life in these efforts. It's just too hard for them to let go of secure files.

Which could be a blessing in disguise. If (and much more likely, when) pressplay and MusicNet finally and unquestionably fail, the majors may finally embrace the unsecure MP3 format. Universal has already made slight overtures in that direction by licensing some of their back catalog to EMusic, and if those efforts outdraw the DRM services, we may finally get the sea change necessary for online music to really work for everybody involved, without rampant piracy, lack of compensation for artists, and pervasive spyware applications. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.