A month ago in Doors, I criticised record companies for lacking the vision to create legal downloading services compelling enough to lure our credit cards onto the dancefloor. Doors asked for its readers’ experiences of the new online stores and, wow, are you angry. Your venom is breathtaking.
The tragedy is that you also express tremendous enthusiasm for the sheer convenience of legal downloads. Our survey reveals that a substantial majority of you insist you are perfectly prepared to pay a fair price for a decent product, but resent paying top dollar for low-rent albums that come riddled with restrictions on how they can be played. You’ve had enough of the viruses, spyware and unreliability that characterise the illegal peer-to-peer (P2P) networks that have dominated downloading for years. Understandably, you refuse to be taken for a ride by the cigar-chomping dinosaurs who run the music business as if the late-1990s free-for-all had never happened.
Alex Kapranos, the front man of Franz Ferdinand, insists that “not everybody wants to steal music. People do want to pay for it”. Rather than being heavy-handed in its approach to downloading, he says, the challenge to the industry is to create legal services that are “more nimble, more user-friendly and more fun to use”.
The hoary issues our survey raises are those of price and sound quality. Nearly everybody who mailed us scornfully points out that legal services charge £8 per album — roughly the same price that many physical CDs cost online — without making clear that a highly compressed computer file sounds inferior both to a disc and to many free illegitimate downloads.
One reader writes: “I thought that paying 79p a track would guarantee better quality than any ‘unofficial’ downloads. I was wrong.” Though poor sound and badly named files top the list of complaints, what really irks readers is the retailers’ lack of transparency. For example, the much-lauded iTunes Music Store neglects to say that its music is compressed. Even the main Apple website doesn ’t come clean: there is no mention of technical quality (the music’s bit rate), merely a statement that you are buying “high-quality AAC music files that won’t disappear”. Unsurprisingly, Apple declined an invitation to comment.
Even the loquacious Steve Jobs, Apple’s chief exec, is outgunned in hyperbole by his competitors here. OD2, the company that operates music stores for MSN, Coca-Cola and Oxfam, laughably claims that its music downloads “deliver near-CD-quality sound”. Yet the Pinocchio’s Nose award goes to Tesco, which, while it sells higher-quality files than most, claims that “the human ear cannot distinguish the difference” from “music sampled at higher rates”. In truth, most downloads sound more akin to magnetic tape than to CD.
Last month, the Advertising Standards Authority upheld a complaint against the internet service provider AOL for boasting that its broadband service offered “CD-quality radio”, as this “implied absolute equivalence between the audio quality of the broadcast and uncompressed CD sound”, which is, of course, absolute horse. This ruling now sets a benchmark for the whole music industry.
Readers’ blood is also boiling at the variety of restrictions placed on the way we can play music files. Ian Clarke, a computer expert from Henley who has tried several legal music services, is exasperated at how difficult it is to establish before purchase which digital rights management (DRM) conditions apply to an album. Even when it is declared, “the information attached is often incorrect”. He also points out that if a song is restricted to say, five burns onto CD, and the disc “bombs out” before completing, you can unfairly lose a burn credit for every track.
Apple’s iTunes emerges with the fewest technical complaints, and it permits you to store downloaded music on up to five computers, whereas other retailers, notably Sony and Tesco, allow only one.
Pricing vexes many of you to the point of accusing retailers of sheer “greed”. A consensus declares that because music downloads have lower overheads, and are a notably inferior product compared with a physical disc, they should be distinctly cheaper than CDs. The average value Doors readers put on a downloaded album is £5.48 — or about 55p per track, considerably less than the going price in the UK online market of 79p.
Steve Redmond, communications director of the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the record companies’ trade association, boldly insists that “focusing on price is misleading”. He adds: “The try-before-you-buy nature of the internet means that, for the first time, people can buy albums on an à la carte, track-by-track basis. This is more convenient for the consumer, who can cherry-pick individual tracks, though the artist still has to record the whole album.” While many Doors readers are keen to download the tracks they want from, say, a new Robbie Williams album without all the padding, Redmond makes a reasonable point.
Apple may have defined the market by putting much the same retail price on its albums (£8). Stores say that because record labels charge the retailer about £6, this allows them a wafer-thin profit of about 7% (after Vat and other outgoings). This cuts little ice with Doors readers, among whom Garry Brogden of Billingham, on Teesside, is typical: “It’s scandalous. Record companies do not have to bear artwork or shipping costs, so they really have to come up with a better business model. Get real.”
There is deep reader frustration at the “silly format war” between Apple, Microsoft and Sony, now the subject of a congressional subcommittee investigation in the United States (though don’t expect it to legislate for open standards).
Several readers rage that formats affect your choice not only of portable music player, but of the software you use to listen to tunes — that you have paid good money for — on your computer. Even those taking the pragmatic view that this conflict is grounded in commercial reality are vocal about the need for clearer information at the point of purchase, better customer care and, most of all, an agreed set of industry standards for the usage restrictions that are imposed through DRM.
Of today’s wildly varying DRM standards, Redmond said that “the terms of any particular licence arrangement are the subject of negotiation between individual record companies and retailers”. Yet many of you say it is absurd to punish consumers because Apple, for example, has negotiated a more liberal rights deal than Tesco. It is like being told that you can play a CD differently because you bought it at HMV rather than Amazon.
Interestingly, one in 10 tech-savvy Doors readers is so fed up with all forms of downloading that they have returned to buying CDs. More than half of respondents say they will continue to swap files illegally over P2P networks, many insisting that this is merely a way to sample music before purchasing. Almost half report that their offline buying has increased since “window-shopping” online; for similar reasons, many praise Napster’s innovative service, which lets you listen to more than 1m tracks for a monthly fee.
In the Doors survey, four readers in 10 shop at legitimate download stores, yet few express enthusiasm; at best, they tolerate these services.
So, the readers have spoken. Many offer workable suggestions for wielding the carrot of the market, rather than the stick of the law, to make honest citizens of us all. In response, Doors proposes a six-point Charter for Action for better practice by the permatanned beasts in the boardrooms of the music industry.
When invited to react to the Doors charter last week, Apple and Sony declined, while Napster gave it qualified support. The BPI’s view was: “We feel strongly that the lack of compatibility between download platforms is the real problem for consumers, and we are lobbying online music retailers to reconsider their practices. Ultimately, the consumer will decide what works for them.”
Now it’s up to you, the music-lovers, to vote with your cash.
