Online Music Wings its Way to the Celestial Jukebox

Celestial Jukebox

By now, we music fans are well accustomed to getting whatever we want online, whether from iTunes, subscription services such as Rhapsody or free P2P networks.

But this new freedom to listen to anything has come without freedom of movement; you're only free to get new music when you're sitting at your computer. When it comes to portable listening, you're generally stuck with whatever you loaded onto your MP3 player.

Pundits have been yammering away for years about a "celestial jukebox" that will give everyone the ability to access all content ever created, from anywhere, at any time. This long-discussed concept is finally becoming a reality, at least as far as music goes.

One option is already available: the music cell phone , which can download music from satellites, literally fulfilling prophecies of a digital jukebox in the sky. According to Kent German, senior editor of CNET's cell-phone reviews section, the two leading wireless music services in the United States are Verizon's V Cast ($2 per track, over a million songs) and the Sprint Music Store ($2.50 a track, 400,000 songs).

If you're at the gym and suddenly decide to motivate yourself with Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger" during the last five minutes of your stairclimber routine, would you pay $2.50 for the privilege? Probably not. But if the song were part of a $15 monthly flat fee? It's a lot more likely (though hopefully you wouldn't get this version).

The celestial jukebox is all about impulse buying. But even if you can buy the music in theory, the pocketbook can rear up as a barrier that's as potent as any technological failure. For cell-phone carriers, price is likely to always be a brick in the wall. Even if they manage to lower prices as their wireless networks become more robust, they'll still have to charge approximately what iTunes charges per song, plus an additional amount to offset their additional infrastructure costs.

In the other corner of the sky is satellite radio. XM and Sirius let you pay a flat subscription fee, but you can't pick and choose what to hear at any given time. And although some satellite receivers let you save songs as they stream to your player, that ability is under legal attack from (who else?) attorneys for the RIAA. Technologies that promise to do the same for terrestrial digital radio (CD-quality FM, FM-quality AM, no subscription fees, with metadata included for each song) have already been threatened by a similar, albeit preemptive attack.

Part of the problem in making online music delivery successful appears to be two deeply embedded, conflicting cultures. The music industry continues to fixate on CD sales as the chief vehicle for delivering its product. Security jitters, for example, have kept record companies from granting streaming services access to their complete catalogues. At the same time, listeners want to own their own music libraries; and, having downloaded billions of songs for free, they are reluctant to pay. “There is a psychological barrier,” Fader says.

CD manufacturers have tried a number of approaches to curtail pirating, from demanding restrictions on computers’ CD-copying abilities to embedding anti-copying codes in CDs. Most have backfired. Customers resisted buying CDs that could only be played on standard players and not on computers, car systems or portable players.

The music industry has tried a number of approaches to offering downloads itself. Most have been hampered by high costs or heavy restrictions on customers’ use of the songs they acquire – technical barriers like “tethering” to prevent users from transferring music from the computer to a mobile device like an MP3 player, for example. “The music industry has always been an industry of evolving formats,” Black said. “I think what’s been really hard for them is they have not been controlling the evolution of the new format.”

While some other services have tried this a la carte approach, iTunes is the first with significant participation from the major record labels, which are starting to acknowledge they must find ways to distribute music via the Internet and not cling so hard to the CD. At the end of June, Apple reported that customers had downloaded more than five million songs since the service was launched eight weeks earlier.