The 90% Solution:
Digital-Music Gripes

By JASON FRY
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE

Jason Fry has lived through the highs and the lows of the digital-music revolution. He has chronicled his efforts to bring his sizable music collection into the Internet age and writes frequently about online music in his Real Time column. Here, he takes a look back at the progress made in 2004 on the digital-music front, and maps the challenging road ahead.

Take it from this digital-music junkie -- there's never been a better time to be a fan of online music. Several legal services offer a host of listening options and an ever-expanding selection, and artists and labels are both paying more attention to digital content and distribution. Music is routinely accessible, portable and playable in ways none of us could have dreamed just a few years ago. It makes for a wonderful world.

But it's also true that once 90% of a job is completed, the last 10% goes from the "Worry About It Later" column to the one marked "Why the #$@%! Is This Still Happening?" And so it is with digital music, where a handful of annoyances continue to bedevil those of us who have taken the plunge.

Here's one digital-music enthusiast's take on recent advances, a wish list for what still needs to be done and thoughts about what it all means for the CD.

Brave New World

Until recently, digital music was basically a referendum on how you felt about stealing. Sure, you could rip your own CDs into MP3s, and, yes, there were sources for obscure indie fare, tunes from unsigned bands and a few pathetic offerings from the major labels. But download a legal copy of a new single or an album track from a mainstream artist? No chance. Meanwhile, peer-to-peer services like Kazaa and Limewire offered all the music you could possibly want -- nearly all of it available without copyright holders' permission.

This left many music fans in a quandary. Using a peer-to-peer service meant you were risking serious legal trouble. Plus, you were stealing money not only from record labels but also from the artists you claimed to like. Such services were also difficult for non-techies to use, unbearably slow and littered with junk files. But the major labels, while very interested in suing copyright violators, didn't seem interested in creating a credible legal alternative.

Then that all changed, thanks largely to Apple Computer Inc.'s Steve Jobs. Apple's iTunes store kick-started the digital-music renaissance when it started offering 99-cent downloads for Windows users in October 2003; the service was soon joined by the likes of Musicmatch and Roxio's Napster 2.0, with Real's RealPlayer Music Store and downloads from online retailers arriving this year. All offer hundreds of thousands of songs, with new releases and back-catalog material added on a regular basis. ITunes often has new releases before they are available in other stores, as well as exclusive tracks. Real, in partnership with Rolling Stone, counters with a weekly hot list of half-priced songs.

This being the Internet, there are digital-music objectors. Audiophiles sniff that sampled digital music can never stand alongside real recordings. (These are the same people who hated CDs, and they're never going to be happy.) Fans of the obscure grouse that, say, two songs found only on the Replacements' 1986 U.K.-only compilation aren't available. (OK, I admit I'm one of them.) People who can't think of anything else to complain about complain that if their hard disk crashes, the songs are gone forever. (Life, it's an uncertain business.)

There never was much of an excuse for stealing music, but there's none now. If you've got a dollar and an Internet connection, you're about 15 seconds away from whatever song on the pop charts you want. It's easy to forget that a year ago this was brand new; today, it's old hat. That in itself is cause for celebration -- except when you surface after a bender and discover that at some point you downloaded seven Journey songs.

Still, drunken downloading isn't the only problem in the digital-music world. Here are one fan's gripes:

Seeking Selection

Even with back-catalog titles hitting the digital-music world every week, gaps remain. The Beatles are the inevitable example, and while the impact of their absence is pretty exaggerated (wrong demographic), they're a symptom of one advantage peer-to-peer services still have over legal services: selection.

The peer-to-peer services magnify niche interests the same way the Internet does. Interested in Afghan Whigs B-sides, old-school hip-hop remixes or proto-jazz acetates? You probably won't find what you're looking for from a legal service. But in the peer-to-peer world, some other enthusiast has probably gone to the trouble of converting the songs you want to digital form and making them available.

Such oddballs are top priorities for dedicated fans, but understandably low on the list for the folks at the legal services who have to do things the right way -- handling rights and clearances and then arranging the technical work of making legal downloads available.

There's probably not a lot that can be done about this, other than to wait for the backlog to catch up. One hopes that the music services will continue to be diligent -- as iTunes and Real Rhapsody generally are -- about offering singles, EPs and other material destined to go from today's oddity to tomorrow's rarity. Meanwhile, the rock labels ought to take a page from jazz: Verve, for one, offers digital versions of long out-of-print albums from the likes of Count Basie and Sarah Vaughn through a number of digital-download services. The digital world is an ideal way for recordings to live on long after they've disappeared from shelves.

The DRM Drama

Legal downloads are music files wrapped in digital rights management (DRM) software intended to prevent them from being copied en masse the way MP3s can be -- files downloaded from iTunes come in a format called AAC, for example, and will only play on a certain number of computers and devices authorized by your account.

DRM is usually discussed as a tool for corporations to protect their property. But its dirty little secret is it's also a tool for the digital-music services to try and lock customers into a particular device or service. Downloads from Apple's iTunes will only play on Apple's iPod. Real Networks offers downloads in a format designed to play on the iPod, but these RAX files won't show up in iTunes, and they require the user to install a high-end version of RealPlayer.

It's possible to turn restricted files into ones that will play on any system, but it's a big pain: You have to burn the protected tracks onto an audio CD, then rip that audio CD back into MP3s. Adding insult to injury, this often strips off the song information, which needs to be re-entered by hand.

DRM isn't the problem here -- it's the use of it in a standards battle. Consumers who are trying to play by the rules shouldn't have to care about an alphabet soup of formats, particularly when all those formats are competing with free, illegal MP3s. What's more, the iPod is a near-perfect piece of consumer electronics that's vastly better than anything else on the market, and Real offers high-quality files and terrific jukebox software. Neither one of these companies needs a crutch.

When you buy a DVD player, you don't worry if it's only compatible with movies sold by certain video chains. When you're buying a DVD, you don't worry that your hardware won't play it. The same needs to be true with digital music.

The Hook-Up

One big problem with digital music is it's stuck on your computer -- which is probably tucked away in a bedroom or study, instead of occupying prime real estate near the stereo.

Connecting a distant PC and stereo isn't for the timid, particularly if you've got a wireless network and are trying to get different manufacturers' equipment to play nice together. A year ago I chronicled my own PC-to-stereo misadventures, which involved ill-advised drilling, goofing around with weird software and buying too much electronic gear. Unfortunately, not enough has changed since then. The most-promising product out there is Apple's Airport Express, a unit the size of a cigarette case. Configure the Airport Express for your wireless network, plug it in next to your stereo, run a jack from one to the other and iTunes sees the stereo as a new set of speakers you can use.

At least that's the theory -- and for people with Apple-only systems, it's probably true. I have a hodgepodge of Windows wireless gear and have spent hours trying to get the Airport Express to behave, so far to no avail. A look at various Apple forums shows I'm far from alone. And this is the best product I've heard of.

The bottom line: Between system incompatibilities, setup woes and software conflicts, getting the PC and the stereo to talk with each other is still much harder than it should be. Digital music belongs in the living room, not the computer room. A number of companies are trying to jump the gap, but they still have work to do.

Taking Precautions

Few of us back up our most-important files as often as we should, leaving treasured letters, photos and documents just a hard-drive crash away from oblivion. And hard-drive crashes happen way more often than we'd like to think.

If you've got a big digital-music collection, you're in even more danger. Ripping dozens or more CDs again is a remarkably tedious task, but at least it's possible: iTunes, like several online services, won't let you just sign back on and download music you've purchased again after it's gone.

This isn't like saving a copy of your resume, either. A single CD requires 70 megabytes or more or storage space, meaning a collection of 100 albums will demand about seven gigabytes on a hard drive. If you're backing up even that much music, you have a choice between fast and cheap. The fast, expensive way is to buy an external hard drive, back up your collection onto it, then disconnect the drive and keep it in a safe place, such as at work or at mom's house. The cheap, tedious way is to burn your files onto CD-ROMs for safekeeping -- if you're making a "data" CD, you should be able to pack more than 100 music files onto each one.

Either way, do something -- don't expect one of the music services to solve this one for you. If you don't do something, it's not a question of if you'll lose your prized music collection, but when.

Remember the CD?

One of the digital-music revolution's biggest changes hasn't received its fair share of ink and pixels: The tyranny of the "one-song CD" has been broken. It's infuriating and all too common to buy a CD because you like one or two songs, then find the rest of the CD is junk. That was one of the top excuses offered by digital-music thieves, but no more: In most cases, all of an album's tracks are available a la carte online. Even rarities are usually accessible: Over Thanksgiving I entertained myself by cherry-picking old B-sides from "The Complete U2" and Nirvana's "With the Lights Out" box set. A year ago, I would've looked glumly at the box sets in the record store, wanting to hear those songs, but not badly enough to buy a lot of material I already had.

Experiences like that are proof of something else: The CD is dying.

Albums now routinely appear on iTunes and other services before their in-store releases. Release dates are hurriedly moved forward because a title is loose on peer-to-peer services. Some labels release albums by "developing" artists only in digital form. More and more artists are experimenting with online-only singles or remixes, short packages of live tracks from in-store appearances, and other ways to keep themselves in the public eye without a new, physical CD in the market.

And this is only the beginning. I bet physical CDs will soon be specialty products for niche markets. In fact, in many cases I think you'll have to pay a surcharge to get one -- just as getting software updates or airline tickets in physical form often requires paying more.

That probably means the eclipse of the album as an art form, which this fan won't particularly mourn: The rock album only dates back to around "Pet Sounds," and most artists are a lot better at writing singles than suites anyway. But it means kids will grow up never having noodled over lyrics, photos and album notes while listening to the music, something that's best appreciated curled up on a couch with an album cover (even if it's just a CD booklet), not perched in an office chair scrolling through a PDF.

But good things will come of this, too. Bands will be free to release less material more often, which should help the smart ones stay in the public eye. That's a key strategy in a fickle era in which a platinum album today is no guarantee of escaping the cut-out bin tomorrow. Bands should also be able to break the album-tour-album routine: It'll be a lot easier to go into the studio to cut a few tracks, release an experimental live album, or just play around without some exec from the label sighing that he doesn't hear a hit single. And that sounds good for all involved.