This week sees the debut of another horrible online music service, MusicNet on AOL. After years of failed litigation against file sharing services, with 60 million people using Kazaa to obtain the music they want for free every hour of every day – after all that, this is what the recording industry has to offer in a big, highly publicized rollout.
– “Tethered” downloads in limited quantities from a scanty library for $8.95/month.
– When you stop paying the monthly fee, the songs you’ve downloaded stop playing.
– You can’t burn the songs onto a CD unless you pay another $9/month – and then you’re only allowed to burn ten songs per month, no more.
– You can’t transfer the songs to any portable device whatsoever.
Pretty tempting, eh? I wish the new service as much success as its competitors are having at PressPlay and Rhapsody – which is to say, abject failure. (The humiliating failure of the recording industry sanctioned services is not being widely reported because the owners of the services are concealing the failures – either out of shame or bullheadedness. But make no mistake – they have zero appeal to anyone.) Here’s an article about the MusicNet rollout.
