Muzak redivivus? Streaming subscription audio - eluyiirut's Space

By Jon Jermey

The following paragraphs are extracted from an article published in the June 2012 issue of Online Currents.*

THE FALL AND RISE OF MUZAK

In 1934 the Muzak Holdings company was established in the US to pipe soothing recorded music via cables into offices, department stores and other public places in many US cities. Seventy-eight years later, having staved off bankruptcy in 2009, Muzak Holdings is still with us, though its delivery methods have changed to embrace new technologies, and it now offers its clients a much broader range of ?channels?. Small wonder, then, that internet entrepreneurs have decided to take a leaf from its book and offer their clients what essentially amounts to the same service (though primped, polished and jazzed-up for the web) ? an endless stream of recorded music, matched to your specifications and delivered on demand.

?INTERNET RADIO

The more immediate roots of streaming audio lie in the internet radio movement. There are currently tens of thousands of internet ?radio? stations, accessible via the web, which broadcast not through the airwaves but over internet cables and connections. Some provide just one ?channel? of music, while others like SomaFM offer more than a dozen. Despite regular skirmishes with recording industry bodies over royalty fees and the potential for copyright infringement, internet radio has become a large industry. Internet radio stations are typically free for the user to access. Some are supported by advertising, others by donations, while public broadcasters, like the BBC in Britain and the ABC in Australia, typically maintain internet radio channels as adjuncts to their free-to-air broadcast activities.

?STREAMING SUBSCRIPTION AUDIO

The user of internet radio can choose from a vast range of channels, offering a huge variety of performers and types of music from baroque to heavy metal. From here it is a relatively small step to allowing users to select, in advance, the exact tracks they want to hear. This is the domain of streaming subscription audio. Originally offered almost as an afterthought by providers selling downloadable music tracks, the subscription audio model has grown to a level of size and sophistication which challenges the ownership model. Now there are many companies offering similar facilities, so prices are going down and the level of service ? and the number of tracks available ? has risen steadily over time. Audio streaming is the recording industry?s latest and best response to the threat of music piracy. Though relatively new in Australia, it is becoming big business in the US.

The basic model is simple: a provider acquires the necessary licences to offer a vast number of high-quality music tracks to its clients on a streaming basis, in return for a monthly or yearly fee: subscribers are permitted to play any track but not to retain the track on their system, so that when the subscription ends, so does their legal access to the music. Subscribers can search the provider?s database for music or performers, and select tracks they want to hear. These are ?queued? on the server and sent to the subscriber?s PC, usually via a web browser. Subscribers can play any track as often as they want to hear it, exactly as if they owned the music. Their choices are saved when they go offline, and they can log in from any other browser and access their music queue from there, though only one user can be logged in to a particular account at any time. Some providers extend the same functionality to mobile devices like mobile phones and Android tablets.

Because the service on offer is essentially the same from each provider, competition is mainly on price, the number of tracks available, and the range of mobile devices supported.

* These extracted paragraphs have been reproduced without footnotes. To read the full article and the author?s discussion of three streaming subscription audio services currently available in Australia, see (2012) 26 OLC 131.

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