Ever since the launch of the original Napster, college students have become increasingly reliant on getting their music fixes from the Internet. While many of the original services were illegally allowing trading of copyrighted materials, a quickly increasing number are offering legal alternatives.
With the RIAA continuing to sue file traders by the hundreds (another 532 lawsuits were filed on Tuesday), The Mirror has tested out three of the more prominent services, found out the pros and cons of each, and looked for unique complications caused by the school’s sluggish connections.
iTunes Music Store Overall Rating: B+
iTunes has a very easy interface for listening to music. You can rate music, easily edit the ID tags of files, and sort it however you want based on over 20 different fields. Categories can be created, with the nice touch of being able to have it dynamically generate a playlist based on certain criteria. For instance, if you want it to only include songs with a rating of 5 stars, or maybe your holiday music collection, you can customize the playlist accordingly.
Accessing the Music Store is as simple as clicking the appropriate link under the Playlist menu. Checking out the top 100 songs in a particular genre, or the entire store, is simple, as is finding new releases and songs just added to the store.
Searching is very simple – in the top right corner, whether a Windows user (for which this is cool) or a Mac user (for which this is customary) is a search box in the software. You can use that to search the store when on that screen, or a playlist or library when you’re in that window.
One drawback: if you want to just browse the library, you have a series of horizontally listed windows. For Mac users, this is fairly similar to what they’re used to, but Windows users will find this clumsy. One other problem with the full search: if you head into a category, and then click on a name, it’ll list all their music, no matter what genre, leaving you with more to sift through.
iTunes selection is broad, with content from all five majors and over 20 independents. With over 500,000 tracks, there’s a good selection. But I had trouble locating some of the tracks, most notably The Beatles, who at this point have opted not to license their music to any major service.
The service kept pace in terms of current Billboard chart favorites and the most popular downloads. Of course, most popular downloads is a bit of a win for iTunes from the get-go, because they are the most popular service so their numbers weigh heavily on the weekly charts.
Previewing songs is a simple process – just double click on the name of the song. (Make sure you don’t hit the “Buy Now” button while you’re doing this.) A 30-second sample of the song will play. Usually, but not always, this is the chorus of the song, the most recognizable part.
The downside to this method is that most other services offer some sort of full stream before it’s purchased, so you know exactly what you’re getting – sometimes a song isn’t all that recognizable unless you hear that first few chords, especially if it’s one you haven’t heard in a long time.
In addition, streaming is somewhat useless during peak hours of ‘net usage, as, assuming the stream starts at all, there are generally numerous interruptions as the stream attempts to rebuffer itself. In other words, it’s a roll of the dice if you’ll actually get to sample tracks easily.
“Buy Now” buttons, with practically one-click purchasing, and an immediate download make this one of the places where iTunes really excels. If a download stalls, or isn’t complete when you shut down the software, the first thing it does is asks if you want to resume the download. This is a very simple way to handle this, and isn’t too confusing for the novice computer user. This is a very good feature to have when the network is not allowing downloads to work, either.
Pricing is also hugely in favor of the consumer. Singles are 99 cents a track; albums are mostly $9.99. Apple has wisely pushed hard to ensure that the singles price is consistent across the board, while albums fluctuate a bit due to the deals they have with the record labels.
The iTunes store is natively designed to sync with Apple’s extremely popular iPod portable music player, which has about a one-third market share of the music market. As such, iPod owners will find this a no-brainer. Non-iPod users may not be out of luck though. Other portable music player companies have been considering offering a patch that allows iTunes downloads to work; some have already introduced that option. Therefore, you don’t necessarily need an iPod to be able to enjoy iTunes, although that’s the best option.
Finally, one major plus that many of the other services don’t have: if you already have downloaded music, you can import your current playlist, since iTunes doubles as a music player. So, you can import in all of your MP3s without difficulty, and sync them into the iPod at the same time.
Real/Listen.com Rhapsody Grade: C-
Rhapsody is quite simple to use. A search box makes it easy to find artists you’re looking for. The results that comes back will show the exact match, if the name is spelled right, or suggested matches if you made an error or the artist is currently unavailable.
For the most part, Rhapsody displays the results of what’s available in their database only, at least by default. However, they have the foresight to also allow you to dig deeper and see what’s not available in their database. This is largely in part thanks to a smart partnership with Muze, one of the more prominent music information services available – their database is extremely comprehensive, and it shows inside Rhapsody.
Playing music within its interface is quite easy, but there’s one major caveat – any music you already own cannot be imported – you’re simply streaming from their service. As such, people who have a lot of music, either purchased or downloaded pre-RIAA lawsuits, will find that part of it a little unfortunate as you wait for the stream to kick in.
You can save songs to your “library” of songs you enjoy, and create playlists off of this database. This gives you a lot of control over what songs you want to listen to, and having more control over what you want to listen to and when. Since you have access to all the music at once, it’s a good feature.
Streaming music is Rhapsody’s specialty – for the $9.99 subscription fee, you can stream music as much as you want. With over 500,000 tracks available, that’s an amazing amount of music to have available to you. As such, if you’re not much of a CD person, but like control of what you’re listening to, this is it. There’s no limits to how much you can stream either, so control is firmly in the hand of the users. This is the selling point, and it’s beautifully executed.
Added bonus – if you’re not home, and you can install their software at another house, you can stream music from someone else’s computer as well. This is great as it allows you the freedom to listen to the music you’re paying for anywhere you are.
Selection-wise, Rhapsody held its own when it came to Billboard favorites, a good sign. Overall, the ability to stream, even if burning is not available, gives Rhapsody a slight edge, since at least you have some access to the music.
Streaming was surprisingly solid considering the school’s network. While there were hiccups, the software saves the data to a cache on the computer, so if you want to play a song again later, you can play it without having to re-establish a connection to Rhapsody’s server to stream it again.
Along with the subscription price, you have the option of paying 79 cents for each song you want to burn. While the lower price might seem attractive at first, two caveats exist. First, for it to be cheaper than iTunes, you’d need to buy 50 songs a month or more. That isn’t too unusual. But the bigger issue is you have to pay every time you want to burn a song. When I asked the customer service team about this, their response was that royalties playing the role they do, you have to keep paying. But iTunes doesn’t have that restriction.
Burning is easy enough – there’s little flame icons that tell you if it’s burnable. Assuming it is, you can build a playlist of tracks you want to burn, pay the 79 cents per track, and burn it – easy enough.
Bigger problem: since you’re not downloading files (at most, you have one massive cache file with all the music you’ve played), you also can’t put it on a portable device without going through the steps of ripping it to MP3, bringing down the quality of the music with it. This, is a knock against Rhapsody for those who want as much access to their music as possible.
Rhapsody has its merits, but they fall squarely in the realm of streaming. Consider this a personalized satellite radio for your computer – same pricing ($9.99 a month), and lots of music options. Just don’t buy music from a service like this unless all you want are one copy, and want it on CD. If you need more flexibility, you can do much better with other options, such as iTunes.
Napster 2.0 Grade: C+
Napster, like the other software options, has a fairly simple interface to operate from. You can see their most popular tracks, new releases, and so on, which makes it similar to iTunes in that respect. You can build playlists, or even let Napster build a custom radio station based on your choices, extrapolating on other music choices you may enjoy.
Napster has a simple search capability, like iTunes, at the top of the screen, making it easy to find what you’re looking for, and a by-category browsing option so you can take a look at music at what’s available in the different styles of music.
One problem with the software is it is decidedly more web-heavy, all the way to how it installs the software on your computer. I continued to have difficulty getting the initial installation completed because of network problems, and that obviously limited our ability to use the software. This is a major issue for those considering this option – your best bet getting started is to install and set up Napster while you’re home on break.
Napster has two versions of streaming available for listeners, as part of its dual-pronged approach. Listeners can preview a 30-second version of the song, just like on iTunes. Or, with the unlimited $9.99 monthly streaming option, the full song can be streamed. Streaming of the song appeared to be set at 96kbps for Napster when I installed, which seems kind of low. However, Windows Media does compress music differently, and the quality seemed decent.
Like the other two services, the selection was solid, with over a half million tracks. Again, certain major artists were missing due to the lack of licensing availability, but pretty much everything else that the casual listener would look for was available.
Purchasing music is similar to iTunes in pricing and setup. It’s 99 cents a song and $9.99 for an album. Unlike iTunes, Napster uses Windows Media for its technology. This means that it’ll work on pretty much any portable music player other than the iPod. This includes their specialized Napster player from Samsung, but also the Rio line of MP3 players, for instance.
One problem with Napster’s approach was there appeared to be no sort of discount for those paying for unlimited streaming. If you are already paying $10 a month, you shouldn’t have to pay 99 cents a song on top of that… Rhapsody at least offers a 20 cent discount per song when you’re doing it that way.
Burning is a snap, and this is one of the gems of the Napster service. Napster is owned by Roxio, which also created the ubiquitous Easy CD Creator that’s on pretty much everyone’s computer nowadays. That software is solid as a rock, and there’s never a problem burning with it, and Napster borrows some of the technology from that, ultimately making burning a painless experience.
Napster is the best option for those looking to stream songs or for those with non-iTunes compliant devices. And just in case there’s anyone wondering if there’s anything left of the old Napster, you can still browse other peoples’ song collections and download. You just have to pay.
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