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What's in a Name?

The first wave of legal online music services had too many restrictions, including limited streaming and copy-protected downloads. So the question is: Will more freedom tempt listeners to ditch their file-sharing apps and pay a monthly fee for the latest tunes? We're about to find out. AOL enters the second-wave music-download arena with its new MusicNet service, which offers three plans: For $3.95 per month, you can stream 20 songs and download 20 copy-protected tracks; $8.95 per month gets you unlimited streaming and copy-protected downloading; and $17.95 per month lets you burn 10 songs, in addition.

FullAudio Corp. aims to tempt music lovers by greatly revamping MusicNow for this second version. A Premium plan for $4.95 per month gives access only to the service's 36 online radio channels. A Full Access plan at $9.95 per month adds unlimited copy-protected downloads and lets you purchase burnable downloads for 99 cents each. MusicNow's à la carte approach is much more convenient than MusicNet's one-size-fits-all philosophy. Judging by Apple's recent music service launch, which offers only song purchases and has no membership rate, à la carte music shopping may be the wave of the future.

Those signing up for FullAudio's MusicNow will need to download the software, which runs inside Microsoft Windows Media Player. It's a convenient solution, since downloaded songs are instantly merged with the others in your existing music library. But restricted and unrestricted downloads look the same, so you have no way of knowing which songs you can burn to a disc and which you can't. Also, Windows 98 users are stuck with Windows Media Player's kludgy CD-burning tool.

One nuisance you'll encounter with AOL's MusicNet sign-up is that only AOL master account holders can purchase the service, not sub-account holders—a hassle for the many people sharing AOL accounts. Once someone with a master AOL account signs up though, all the sub-account holders can use the service. Oddly enough, MusicNet doesn't work within AOL—you need to download a separate client. You can listen to downloaded songs while off-line but must log on to AOL to do anything more.

Now Hear This

The catalogs of both services are similar, but while MusicNow claims over 200,000 songs, MusicNet boasts of over 300,000. Although both providers have licensing deals with the five major record labels (BMG, EMI, Sony, Universal, and Warner), their catalogs are patchy: Some albums are complete, with every track listed, others offer only a few tracks. You can burn some tracks but only stream or play others on a local PC.

MusicNet may have the bigger catalog, but MusicNow has a much more pleasant interface. That's because it has 36 channels broken up by genre. You can listen to a channel's radio stream or browse among the listed artists. You can also pull up relevant biographical information for any artist. If you search for an artist that isn't carried, MusicNow usually refers you to similar artists.

MusicNet's interface, on the other hand, is sparse and underdeveloped. It offers no channels and no way to browse except by searching on names or wading through an enormous A-to-Z list of everything in the database. Browsing becomes unpleasant quickly. You can call up biographical information on artists, which opens in the main AOL client, but what you get is skimpy.

The Sound of Music

MusicNow streams songs from 32 to 128 Kbps, depending on the connection speed, in WMA format. Purchased tracks are 128 Kbps. You can burn them twice and transfer them to three portable players an unlimited number of times. MusicNet streams songs from 16 to 132 Kbps in the proprietary MNS (MusicNet Stream) format. Permanent downloads record at 132 Kbps in MND (MusicNet Download) files, and you can burn the files twice per credit. You can't transfer files to portable devices, but once files are on standard audio discs, they no longer have copy-protection mechanisms in place, of course. Although many audiophiles demand 192-Kbps downloads, neither service offers them, which is shameful.

Parents wary of explicit lyrics will appreciate that MusicNet works with AOL's existing parental controls and blocks songs with adult content. MusicNow identifies songs with explicit lyrics but has no mechanism to block songs containing them.

For the moment, FullAudio's MusicNow is far ahead of AOL's MusicNet. It offers a more pleasant browsing experience and a better way of downloading and buying files. But AOL has announced à la carte shopping for later this year, so perhaps MusicNet will gain ground quickly. Now that would be something to sing about.