Are you looking for the perfect online music service?
A service that has every song in the world for a good price in an unprotected format and with a sound quality equal to the audio CD?
Sorry, we have to disappoint you. There is no such service yet. You will probably have heard of the iTunes Music Store, and Napster, services supported by the big labels.
These services are highly criticized because of the price level and limitations due to Digital Rights Management. Many believe that this approach will never attract the millions of p2p users who are trading billions of music files for free. The strategy of the big labels is to force p2p users to refrain from their illegal actions by threatening them with lawsuits. This will only cause P2P users to switch to anonymous methods of sharing, thus making the big label’s problems bigger than ever before. P2P is here to stay, that’s for sure. How long will it take the music industry to realize that this is not the way to go?
It may seem impossible to compete with free, but we are convinced that there is a way. Making legal downloading more attractive than P2P is the answer.
Bridging the gap
Services like Allofmp3, eMusic
and
GoMusic prove
that it can be done. They offer popular music in an unprotected format for a decent price. This concept has already made thousands of die-hard P2P users paying for downloading music.
You would expect the big labels to copy this successful business model. The Music Industry has been disregarding the Internet for years
in a row, leaving this great way to distribute music to those who they consider
to be pirates. Introducing services like Itunes Music Store and MSN Music did
not really change this. These people are not in it for the music. Their main
goal is to sell hardware or to prevent their competitor from getting too big a slice.
The past few years we have been gathering information on music services. We hope this will help you finding a consumer friendly music service.