back to blogging after a serious DSL outage.

They Just Don't Get It (part 2,385)

David Pogue's comprehensive review of five new pay-for-play music downloading services illustrates the degree to which the music industry has failed to recognize the importance of comprehensive catalogs. The "illegitimate" services like Napster and KaZaA have always held the promise of potentially finding anything (so long as at least a few others share your interest in a given obscure recording). By contrast, the pay-for-play services don't even guarantee access to the original recording of the most popular song in history (if you gauge by the number of times it has been covered by other performers). As Pogue writes:

"Most of these services offer pretty much the same 250,000 songs because they have all struck deals with the same major record companies. That's certainly enough music to cover, say, an aerobics workout, but it is by no means every pop song every written. You'll encounter big holes in the Billboard Top 100 list, for example.

Worse, some of the biggest performers, or their agents, refuse to play the online-music game. You won't find much of anything from Madonna, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, Pearl Jam or the Beatles, for example. (Pressplay does list a rendition of the Beatles' "Yesterday" - played on panpipes. The Beatles' agent sure has a funny sense of licensing priorities.)

Even if you do find the song you're seeking, the little "CD-burnable" flame icon next to its name is missing on about half the songs in most services' catalogs. In other words, you can listen but you can't download it to own. Pressplay claims that "well over 90 percent" of its catalog is burnable, but even there, you can't buy anything from Britney Spears, 'N Sync, Aaliyah, Mos Def, and other current hit makers."

Of course, the "Beatles' agent" is out of the picture. That song is the property of none other than Michael Jackson (and Sony). One of the happy by-products of Jackson's ongoing self-immolation is that if has spent all of his money, he may well be forced to sell his share in the Beatles catalog back to Sony, thus reducing the pool of rights-holders and, one would hope, leading to more rational approaches to licensing and circulating that band's music.


Then again, given Paul McCartney's recent egomaniacal inversion of the "Lennon-McCartney" songwriting credit, one wonders whether anything that increases the likelihood of the catalog staying out of his hands isn't a sort of poetic justice.