RealPlayer music store a solid option
By Mike Langberg
Knight Ridder News Service
RealNetwork's new RealPlayer Music Store gets my vote as the second-best place to legally buy songs online — and that's not a criticism.
Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store is so elegantly crafted that it's hard to imagine anyone will do better in the near future.
But online music is going to be a huge business, with more than enough sales to support several major players, so there's no shame in having a solid lock on the No. 2 spot.
Launched Jan. 7, the RealPlayer Music Store (www.real.com/musicstore) follows a formula that's beginning to look familiar: Individual songs are 99 cents, most albums are $9.99, you can burn the downloads to CD and you can transfer them to a few portable players.
What sets the RealPlayer apart is its ability to play the songs on your computer's hard drive that you've purchased from other online music services, including iTunes, Napster 2.0, Walmart .com and MusicMatch.
This may not seem like a big deal now, when most people have relatively few downloaded songs. But this will be a big benefit in coming months and years as we begin to accumulate huge libraries from multiple stores. RealPlayer lets you put together a play list from that library without worrying where you bought an individual track — a trick no other service can yet match.
Before I delve into the details, let's briefly review recent history. It's clear 2003 was a pivotal year for music on the Internet, for two reasons.
First, Apple gave a powerful demonstration that consumers are willing to pay for songs online if the buying experience is done right. While iTunes (www.itunes.com), introduced for the Macintosh in April and for Windows in October, isn't perfect and isn't the last word on the subject, it's very good.
Second, the recording industry took the unpleasant but necessary step of suing individuals who steal music through file-sharing sites such as Kazaa. Since the first suits were filed by the Recording Industry Association of America in September, piracy is heading downward for the first time and CD sales are inching back up.
Apple's success with iTunes hasn't gone unnoticed; there's a rapidly expanding list of online music stores offering tracks from all of the five major recording groups: BMG, EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner. In addition to the stores I've already mentioned, there's BuyMusic.com, MusicNet on AOL, MusicNow and Streamwaves. Sony has announced plans for a music service called Connect to launch by summer, and Amazon.com is expected to enter the fray soon. RealNetworks also runs a separate service called Rhapsody (www.listen.com) that sells access to music through a monthly subscription fee.
The appeal is obvious. You can pick among hundreds of thousands of songs, more than you'd find in all but the biggest record stores. Buy single songs without having to pay for an entire album, and you can shop without leaving home.
The downloads arrive in a copy-protected format; iTunes and Real use a format called AAC and all the others use a format developed by Microsoft called WMA. You're free to play the files on three computers of your choosing, but you can't give the file to friends. You can also record, or "burn," the files as standard music CDs if your computer has a CD burner. These CDs will play in any CD player, and can even be converted — or "ripped" — into MP3 files with no copy protection.
RealPlayer cuts through this confusion by playing all AAC and WMA copy-protected songs on your computer. Or at least it does for now; there's no guarantee some other service won't take steps to deliberately cripple RealPlayer's access.
I tried RealPlayer on the same computer I've used for reviewing BuyMusic.com, iTunes and Napster. Compatibility was seamless and instant; I only had to click on songs from the other services to listen with RealPlayer. I could easily put together a long play list mixing songs from any of the services I've used.
The one thing you can't do yet is burn tracks from other services to CD. RealNetworks says it's working on a software upgrade to make that happen with WMA files, but won't be able to burn iTunes files because Apple won't give RealNetworks the necessary license.
Otherwise, the RealPlayer Music Store works much like its competitors. You can search through the catalog by artist, song title or album title; you can assemble custom play lists; and the software will play music CDs and even DVDs.
