All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
At this week's Plug In '97 Conference, part of the Intel New York Music Festival, high-profile music and technology companies like MTV, Microsoft, and SonicNet jockeyed for the lead in the race for music distribution online.
N2K jumped ahead of the pack with the debut Thursday of its "e_mod" (encoded music online delivery) system for Dolby-quality downloading, built using Liquid Audio software. Coupled with consumer-market CD burners priced at US$400 (also announced Thursday), N2K's e_mod signals the dawn of customized compilations track by track - the ultimate CD mix.
"This is the end of the days when music fans had to spend $16 on a CD for one song," said Liquid Audio CEO Gerry Kearby.
Traditional labels have been interested in online delivery of music, but the threat of digital bootlegging has kept them out of the market. Liquid Audio 2.0 hopes to dispel record companies' fears of rampant piracy with patented encryption and watermarking capabilities. Consumers have to create a personal account to download e_mod, which lets the company track down the source of pirated CDs. Additionally, Liquid Audio's encryption prevents a track from being downloaded from the Internet more than once.
Hoping to nail the market for burn-your-own CDs, N2K's Music Boulevard has already started to offer e_mod, but the company will need to create the market for it first. The online store is therefore pushing a Phillips CDD-2600 drive, and Hewlett-Packard and Yamaha, among others, will soon release compatible drives of their own.
For now, the selection of downloadable tracks is fairly thin, but N2K promises that list will expand. Consumers can now download singles from only 15 different artists - including Phil Ramone, Stewart Copeland, and Jonathan Butler - for 99 cents a track.
With Liquid Audio technology, online music information sites like SonicNet and CNET's Mediadome could turn into distributors overnight. The era of manufactured, store-bought CDs may be coming to an end, says Josh Harris, chairman of online radio network Pseudo, and the value will shift away from packaging and toward the music and artist themselves. "At Pseudo we build our own artists," Harris says. "We make sure they get online every week [and develop] relationships with their fans."
In fact, Liquid Audio is already distributing its software to individual artists who want to bypass all the middlemen - the management and record companies that subsume most of the royalties. But, says Nicholas Butterworth, creative director of SonicNet, the morass of more than 65,000 music-related sites calls for filters, or what are essentially online labels: "Fans get lost among the clutter of clubs, music stores, and individual artists on the Web." Ultimately, online distribution may simply echo traditional channels. "The artist is important," he says, "but the brand is more important."
From the Wired News New York Bureau at FEED magazine.
