Betamax, VHS and Digital Music

Joe Wilcox | December 01, 2003, 11:07 AM

For an upcoming Jupiter Research report, I’ve spent a fair bit of time using different online music services, including Apple’s iTunes Music Store, MusicMatch, RealNetwork’s Rhapsody and Roxio’s Napster 2.0. All four services offer great selections, services and extras. Consumers could easily buy music from Napster, MusicMatch or Rhapsody and play the songs on multiple music players--even from a competing music service. This is possible because all three services use Microsoft’s Windows Media Audio format.

People looking to buy music from the iTunes Music Store or, say, Napster face a dilemma. Apple uses Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), the MPEG-4 audio format, and the company’s Fairplay digital rights management (DRM) technology. The iTunes 4 music player cannot play WMA files; the three other music service players and Microsoft’s own Windows Media Player cannot access the AAC files. This creates a pretty hefty barrier for consumers looking to buy music from the iTunes Music Store and one of the many operations supporting WMA.

Apple’s music store offers many exclusives not available on the other stores. Some of the WMA stores also offer exclusives and songs not available from the iTunes operation. So, some consumers would have good reason to want to shop at multiple online stores. As they do today, at retail shops. Target might have Dido’s new album on sale, but the best price on the new Blink-182 CD might be at Best Buy. No matter where the consumer buys the CD, he or she can be sure it will play in about 100 percent of CD players.

That’s not necessarily the case with digital singles and albums. The only sure way for compatibility: Burn the songs to CDs.

While reminiscent of the 1980’s VHS vs. Betamax tape format wars, consumers shouldn’t assume some eventual winning format will render their digital music purchases useless. That said, for right now, those considering Apple’s service over the majority of other competing digital music stores can expect some hardship. They may need to pick and stick with the iTunes Music Store. The other option: By from iTunes Music Store and other operations but accept that some songs will play in Apple’s music player and some in other music players. It’s a workable solution, but necessarily the best way to create that perfect playlist of songs.