The Red and Black

Issue date: 1/23/08 Section: News

Media Credit: PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY RICHARD HAMM Looking for a quick fix [Click to enlarge]

Media Credit: GRAPHIC BY ASH SECHLER MAPPING THE OVERLAP: With Chumbawamba and Xtina among my guiltiest of pleasures, who am I to judge your musical tastes? That's why I spent hours typing every artist I could think of into all five downloading services and recording the results in everyone's favorite visual aid: the Venn diagram. I might've done all the work, but only you can be the judge when evaluating a service's selection. For example, eMusic has Arcade Fire but not Britney, Ruckus has Britney but not Zeppelin and Napster has Zeppelin but not Arcade Fire. Past iTunes and Rhapsody, you're looking at a crapshoot, so pay attention when a record label is listed in parentheses after an artist's name - that means every artist on that label falls in the same category (e.g. Andrew Bird and Townes Van Zandt, both on Fat Possum Records, would fall alongside Dinosaur Jr. in the diagram's centermost section). [Click to enlarge]

Four months, one week - that's how long I've been clean.

After seven years of abuse, quitting was easy, yet withdrawal's been anything but.

From Napster to SoulSeek, Eve 6 to Interpol, I downloaded more than 1,000 songs - all illegally, all without consequence.

But with waves of letters now arriving from the RIAA every month, I've at last kicked my habit, if only because I lack the $3,000 to $5,000 in disposable income necessary to prevent the industry bigwigs from bleeding me dry in court.

With only a debit card and a laptop at my disposal, I spent the past two weeks test-driving the gamut of legal downloading services so you wouldn't have to.

From the runt of the pack (eMusic) to the bully of the bunch (iTunes), the pesky newcomer (Ruckus) to the seasoned veterans (Napster and Rhapsody), each had its strengths and weaknesses, its quirks and glitches, its sweet spot and Achilles heel.

If you're anything like me, you'll be lucky enough to scrape together the spare change for one of these services, let alone five, which is why I refused to take the cheap way out.

That's right - there's a winner at the end of this battle royale, and you just might be surprised at who comes out on top.

Legal Downloading 101

iTunes: The status quo

As the industry standard since its opening almost five years ago, the iTunes Music Store is the village bicycle of legal downloading services - everyone's had a ride.

Likewise, everyone knows what to expect, and for most, that's more than enough to keep them coming back.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced last week in his Macworld keynote address that iTunes has sold more than four billion songs, 125 million TV shows and seven million movies. He's right to brag - no other service comes close.

iTunes' interface is warm, fuzzy and familiar, and in this respect, its competitors are miles behind. A customer with zero computer literacy could shop iTunes with ease, which is why the iPod/iTunes combo is so often the weapon of choice for average Joes who love music but fear technology.

"As far as Georgia goes, we're pretty much an iPod campus," says SGA senator Brendan Wright, himself an iPod user. "I don't really see any other MP3 players around, despite the fact there are more and more out there."

For those of us on college budgets, where iTunes suffers is its cost. Though the buck-a-song pricing once seemed a bargain, Apple's competitors have long since ditched that model in favor of a monthly subscription fee for unlimited access or even an entirely ad-supported downloading service.

What ensures iTunes' continued dominance is its convenient but pricey digital video downloads ($1.99 for a TV episode, $14.99 for a movie and now $3.99 for a rental) and its marriage to all things Mac.



Napster: Genesis

In the beginning, there was Napster.

Long before legal downloading was a billion-dollar business, Northeastern University dropout Shawn Fanning dealt the music industry a crushing blow, allowing our generation to rip, share, steal and burn our ways to bona fide, albeit illegal, record collections.

"Now students are surprised by this mad frenzy with the RIAA," Wright says. "When Napster came out, no one ever really thought about the legal repercussions of it."

That is, no one except Dr. Dre, Metallica and the RIAA, who forced Napster into bankruptcy with a barrage of costly lawsuits.

Less than two years later, the headphone-sporting alien rose from his ashes as the mascot behind a subscription-based downloading service, and a legal one at that.

Unlike with eMusic's pesky per-month allotments, $9.95 a month will buy you unlimited access to Napster's entire catalog. Why, you ask, would labels agree to such a carte blanche contract?

Simple. With DRM in tow, nothing is carte blanche. Such encryption dictates exactly how and where you can play back Napster downloads. In other words, your selection may be limitless, but your control is anything but.

Pay attention here because Ruckus and Rhapsody employ similar schemes. Every song you download will remain hopelessly stranded on your PC unless you pay an extra $5 a month for Napster To Go, which allows file transfers to a handful of cell phones and MP3 players. Big surprise - the iPod's not invited.

Moreover, unlimited access courtesy of DRM means the songs you download are never really yours unless you buy them, which Napster allows via the traditional buck-a-song pricing. All the $9.95 a month gets you is "unlimited" access so long as you're a Napster subscriber. The second you cancel, all your songs are void.



Rhapsody: Anything you can do, I can do better

During Napster's two-year hiatus, Rhapsody meanwhile filled the vacuum and made its name as the first service to earn the big bucks streaming, not selling, music.

Nowadays, Rhapsody operates much like the revamped Napster, or vice versa if you consider Rhapsody the forerunner.

Whereas a monthly subscription to Rhapsody will set you back $12.99 as compared to Napster's $9.95, Rhapsody To Go costs only $2 extra as compared to Napster To Go's $5.

Do the math, and you'll realize both services offer the same convenience (unlimited access and unlimited portability) for the same $15 a month.

If paying extra to put your songs on your MP3 player sounds like a scam, tough luck. As with everything else in the music industry, labels dictate that.

"If you're a rights holder, the more areas you allow a particular song to be used, the more compensation you're going to want," says Ronda Scott, Rhapsody's PR manager. "There's a little bit more flexibility involved there, so there's a cost associated with that."

Thankfully, Rhapsody's list of compatible devices far surpasses that of Napster. Likewise, Napster is PC-only, whereas Rhapsody (but not Rhapsody To Go) will work on Macs.

Rounding out its one-upmanship is the 10 cent per song discount enjoyed by Rhapsody subscribers on songs purchased via the conventional buck-a-download model.



Ruckus: Big man on campus

The bad news first: Ruckus, that ad-supported, Facebook-friendly download service your SGA keeps hyping, isn't necessarily free and won't necessarily work on a Mac.

"Unfortunately, the only subscription model like that right now is for the Windows platform," explains Ed Cheely, Ruckus' director of campus sales. "We will have a streaming service available later this spring that will work on any platform."

In the meantime, Mac users can always run Ruckus over Parallels, a program allowing any Intel-powered Mac to run Windows side-by-side with OS X. The catch? Parallels cost $80, kind of defeating the purpose of a free downloading service.

That said, consider the good news. Ruckus itself ranges from free (as long as you're a University student) to almost free ($19.95 a semester for Ruckus To Go) to still cheaper than the other guys ($8.99 a month for an alumni subscription).

"We found nobody else will offer that to a college campus," says Bert DeSimone, communications director for EITS. "We don't pay them at all, so what we have bought in at this point is really very little."

"There's actually no money that comes out of student fees for this," adds Wright, the catalyst behind Ruckus' partnership with the University, a partnership he hopes will save his classmates money and teach them all the while. "The RIAA," he explains, "isn't really doing anything to educate. They're just suing students left and right because they can."

"Our hope," DeSimone says, "is that Ruckus can in some way offset any issues related to illegal music downloading because it provides a legal way of doing it."

If free and legal sounds too good to be true, you're wrong. Because the service is available only to those with a valid .edu e-mail address, Ruckus offers advertisers a narrow and increasingly coveted target audience: you.

Wary at first, I've hardly noticed the ads during my stint with Ruckus, which I guess is good news for you and bad news for the advertisers.

Aside from, you know, being free, Ruckus functions much like Napster and Rhapsody, with DRM allowing unlimited access to a catalog that falls somewhere between the indie-centric eMusic and the all-inclusive iTunes. Still, Ruckus should satisfy all but the snobbiest of music snobs, and even they'll be getting their money's worth.



eMusic: The little service that could

On the other end of the spectrum is the smart, quirky and dirt-cheap eMusic, a subscription service that predates even Napster but has stayed under the radar for more than a decade due to its indie creed.

eMusic is unique in its insistence upon DRM-free (Digital Rights Management) downloads, a business move that has kept the "Big Four" record companies (Universal, Sony BMG, EMI and Warner) from signing on.

"All record labels make decisions on how they will sell their material to customers," says Cathy Nevins, eMusic's vice president for corporate communications. "Our mission is to always offer tracks in the universally-compatible format and to offer customers a great value. We don't see that changing."

Why, you ask, would eMusic sacrifice so much for a mere technicality?

Because DRM is the ball-and-chain of legal downloading and, as we'll later see, the fine print to any "free" music.

Apple's version of DRM, ironically dubbed Fairplay, prevents playback of iTunes purchases on any device except the iPod. Likewise, because Apple refuses to license Fairplay to its competitors, songs from Napster, Rhapsody and Ruckus are useless to the iPod faithful.

Therein lies the selling point for eMusic. All three million-plus of its songs are old-school MP3s - no ifs, ands or buts.

Downloads will play on your iPod, your Zune, even that rinky-dink gizmo you found in a cereal box. Heck, you could even e-mail a song you bought from eMusic to everyone you've ever known - happy birthday to them.

DRM-free MP3s might have been the way of the past, but they're also the way of the future, and eMusic's warm embrace of this format has won the service more than 350,000 subscribers, as well as some serious indie cred.

Another quirk in eMusic's DNA is its subscription model. Ranging from Lite (15 downloads a month for $5.99) to Premium (75 downloads a month for $19.99), the four pricing options average out to about 30 cents a song - less than a third of what you'll pay elsewhere for inferior DRM-encrypted files.

What this peculiar model means is that you'll spend next to nothing per song, but you'll also have to exercise a little self-control. Far from the unlimited access offered by Napster, Rhapsody and Ruckus, an eMusic subscription gives you only a fixed number of downloads per month.

Run out, and you'll have to wait until next month or purchase a Booster Pack, which abandons the 30-cents-a-song mark. Note to self: unlike your cell phone minutes, unused downloads do not roll over.

THE VERDICT

Four months, three weeks and counting - that's how long I've been clean.

Considering my affinity for music and my hatred of spending money, if I can quit, then anyone can. So uninstall those programs, delete your shared folder and pay up.

Or do like more than 6,000 of your classmates, and don't.

Over the long weekend, Ruckus celebrated its millionth download from the University, but I say big whoop.

After two weeks courting Ruckus, I see no reason why the total shouldn't be 10 times that.

Students have nothing to lose, everything to gain and something to prove, namely that an all-legal, ad-supported downloading service can in fact succeed.

For some, I'll even go a step further. At only $19.95 a semester, Ruckus To Go is a serious bargain for freshmen and sophomores not already wed to their iPods. For those nearing graduation, however, investing in a compatible (and all too often inferior) MP3 player solely for a few semesters' use just isn't worth the trouble.

If you already have an iPod, a Mac and as many dollars as there are songs you'd like to own, then your choice (iTunes) has already been made. But for those of us on a budget, think differently.

Napster and Rhapsody may offer limitless selection, but unless you have a compatible player and can afford the To Go fee, paying for these services feels a little too much like those five other bills you've got to worry about every month.

As with Ruckus, such a DRM-laden subscription is a great way to explore new music but no way to build a permanent library.

The trick is to pick a service you can afford now but whose downloads will last forever, and that's where eMusic prevails.

The subscription model may be an analog solution in a digital world, but MP3s and iPods are as close to future-proof as technology gets nowadays. Napster, Rhapsody and Ruckus, meanwhile, are anything but.

Remember: this isn't marriage. Your choice won't be 'til death do you part, but you'd prefer if your music was.

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