Real Networks plans to offer online music subscription service

Real Networks, along with three major record labels, has announced that it will make music available online for consumers to download.

The joint venture, to be called MusicNet, will charge users a monthly subscription fee. EMI, Bertlesmann and AOL Time Warner have agreed to make music from their artists available through the service.

This development comes at a crucial time for the future of online music. The recording industry has been roundly criticized by executives at Napster for refusing to sell the rights to its music at any price.

At the same time, the Senate Judiciary Committee has been holding hearings this week about the future of online music, with Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) publicly speculating that legislative action may be required to make record companies sell their content online.

In the face of this pressure, important details about the MusicNet venture remain unknown. The companies involved have yet to announce how much the service will cost or when it will be launched. It is also not yet known whether the record labels involved will make all of their music available, or just some of it.

With Napster screening its servers for copyrighted songs, many Internet users have turned to alternative software packages that allow them to trade copyrighted music without charge. It remains unclear whether consumers will be willing to pay for what they can get for free.

Napster CEO Hank Barry told Congress this week that his company's research shows 70 percent of Napster users would be willing to pay a monthly fee for music.

However, some Princetonians indicated they would be hesitant to pay for online music.

"I think the online music revolution is great," Andrew Sepielli '01 said. "If a few copyright laws are broken here and there, I think it only serves as an incentive for record companies to put more music online."

"Even if Napster is shut down, the idea of Napster is still out there," Kevndra Kramlich '04 added. "Services like Gnutella and OpenNap that can't be shut down will take its place." Kramlich explained that she doubts efforts to charge for online music will be successful as long as the files are available for free.

Andrew Appel, a University computer science professor, is leading a freshman seminar on intellectual property, the Internet and the Napster case.

"It's a complicated issue," Appel explained. "On the one hand, you don't want people pirating works of art without paying for them. On the other hand, in a free society we don't want artists to have unlimited control over their art."

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"Before the Internet, things were good," he added. "Artists were getting rewarded for their art, and it was possible but difficult to make illicit copies of music. The challenge now is to preserve that balance in a world with the Internet."

"As they try [to stop the copying of music] the record companies may shut down a lot of socially desirable free speech," Appel said. "The labels have their lawyers send [cease-and-desist] letters to these sites, even though there sometimes aren't any copyrighted songs on the sites."