BEST TO BUY MUSIC A LA CARTE (4-2003)

These days if you want to own the music of your favorite 
soloist or group you go down to a retailer or log on to the 
Internet to a site like Amazon.com or CDNow.com and buy a 
CD. It’s pretty much the way it has always been as long as 
I can remember, except that CDs have replaced vinyl record 
albums and 8-track tapes.

The problem is, and has always been, what if you only 
really like two or three of the songs on the CD. In that 
case you’ve shelled out $15-plus for a collection of songs 
you don’t care for.

So what most of us wind up doing is transferring the songs 
we really like onto an audio tape (or onto a writable CD) 
and customize our mix of tunes. We then no longer have to 
listen to, or skip over, the garbage.

But wouldn’t it be nice if we could simply go to the music 
store and order up a CD already chock full of only the 
songs we want? No longer would we have to buy an entire CD 
of the Dixie Chicks or Celine Dion and hope the tunes we 
don’t recognize will be good.

But maybe those unknown songs are good, and by purposely 
skipping over them when we order our customized CD, we 
never get to enjoy the music we might otherwise love. No 
problem. All music outlets would be equipped with preview 
headphones so that customers can listen to whatever song 
they want from whatever album.

Last week it was announced that Apple Computer is possibly 
interested in purchasing the world’s largest music company, 
Universal Music, from its parent company, Vivendi. It wants 
to be able to add all the music controlled by Universal to 
a downloadable database so that customers don’t have to 
purchase CDs at all; they can just log on and download one 
or more songs at will – for a fee, of course.

But anyone with an Internet connection can already do that 
through several song-swapping services, such as Kazaa. The 
trouble with doing so is that it is largely illegal due to 
copyright infringement.

But downloaded music has really taken a bite out of the 
music industry’s wallet over the past couple of years, and 
despite lawsuits and court settlements, the losses continue 
to mount.

The problem for the music industry is that they failed to 
jump on the Internet bandwagon before it was too late to 
prevent losses. Even today, there own song downloading Web 
sites are much inferior to the pirate sites because most of 
the record companies put too many restrictions on what you 
can do with a song once you download it. To be worth 
something to the consumer, it has to be portable.

Apple is taking a big risk if they go ahead with the deal, 
because there are four other major record companies out 
there whose songs will not be available to download from 
Apple’s site. But it does show that finally there is some 
movement toward the mergence of music sales and online 
technology. 

In the future, it is very likely that all the music in your 
collection will either have been downloaded from the 
Internet, or purchased a la carte in the same manner from a 
record store. Perhaps then, the price we pay for the music 
we want to listen to will reflect its true value, instead 
of being inflated in order to line the pockets of the music 
executives.