Mike Drummond writes about Madison:
19-Sep-1999 Sunday
More than five decades ago, with America facing the very real possibility of military defeat, the government launched a classified program to build the superweapon that would ensure victory. Its code name was "The Manhattan Project."
Today, the traditional music industry is likewise faced with a threat to its existence. And it, too, has launched a classified program aimed at countering that threat. Its code name is "The Madison Project."
Like the atomic program of the 1940s, IBM's new experiment in the field of online music delivery is shrouded in secrecy, and is costing an undisclosed amount of money.
With the support of the world's five major record labels, IBM this summer launched the experimental AlbumDirect.com Web site to sell and deliver titles from Aretha to Zappa over high-speed Internet connections. And they've selected San Diego as ground zero for the ongoing test, which involves about 1,000 hand-picked customers of Time Warner Cable's Road Runner cable-modem Internet service.
The test subjects can use their computers to download songs, encoded with a digital "wrapper" to thwart bootlegging, then record the tracks to blank CDs using $300 Hewlett-Packard CD writers that IBM provided all its Madison guinea pigs. No more trips to Tower Records. No more need to change out of your jammies, for that matter, before recording your own compact discs.
AlbumDirect is supposed to be convenient, cost-effective and -- most
important for the record-industry titans -- piracy proof. But some of those taking part in the initial study say AlbumDirect offers none of the above, at least in its current incarnation.
Alarm over MP3
It is no small coincidence that IBM and its music-industry allies selected San Diego as its test site. The county has no less than three high-speed, cable-modem Internet service providers, offering fertile soil to test a system requiring fast connections.
Moreover, the area is home to several pioneering online music businesses with foundations built on MP3, a technology that compresses digitized sound files from CDs for easy transfer and download over the Internet. The most visible target is publicly traded MP3.com, the concert promoter and online music distributor. MP3.com did not invent MP3 -- that honor goes to Germany's Fraunhofer
Institute -- but the local company has done as much as any to evangelize the legal use of MP3 technology and seed interest in a growing global crop of portable digital music players from a variety of manufacturers.
Many in the recording industry are alarmed, because MP3 potentially allows for songs to be ripped from CDs and zapped in minutes across the vast reaches of cyberspace without regard to royalty payments. Music officials are scrambling to curtail MP3, and at the same time forging independent alliances with a variety of companies promoting alternative technologies. IBM's AlbumDirect, officially launched June 29 and expected to run at least to Dec. 31, represents one of the recording industry's salvos.
"I think the idea is fantastic," said one AlbumDirect tester, a classically trained pianist who studied at the Juilliard School and just happens to work at a San Diego company that makes MP3 software. "But the way they have it set up, it's kinda lame." (He and several others interviewed for this article didn't want to be identified. As test subjects, they get to keep the CD writers as long as they abide by a non-disclosure agreement.)
Early this summer, the Mission Beach resident had logged on to the
password-protected AlbumDirect site and downloaded Enigma's 1990 release MCMXC A.D. -- one of the two freebie albums that testers were offered. Today, using an adapter cable plugged from his PC's sound card to his hi-fi stereo system, he can pipe the trance-like "Principles of Lust" and other tracks into his room. The sound is "pretty clean," the 27-year-old acknowledged, while giving the track a listen recently.
Beyond fidelity, however, there are issues of price, portability and
user-friendliness. Test subjects say these are AlbumDirect's warts. Their experiences also expose the recording establishment's timid embrace of the Internet, at least as a platform for delivering music.
Many of AlbumDirect's downloadable CDs cost $14 or more, not much less than a CD at a brick-and-mortar store, and more than what bidders pay at online auction sites. AlbumDirect was selling Sarah McLachlan's chart-topping "Fumbling Towards Ecstasy" for $14.38, which did not include the cost of recording or "burning" the tracks to a blank CD or printing liner notes and album art on glossy, specialty paper perforated to fit CD containers. The same title recently was available at Cdnow.com, an online retail music store, for $15.99. Tower Records near the San Diego Sports Arena had it marked at $17.99.
AlbumDirect charges $2 for blank CDs and about $2.30 a sheet for the
specialty paper -- both available in stores for less money. Throw in
mailing charges for those items and users can expect to pay upward of $20 for a CD, not including all the time and effort downloading, then recording the CD and printing the liner notes and album art.
The fact there are no manufacturing or distribution costs associated with delivering music online has Madison participants wondering why AlbumDirect is charging so much. "I think these prices are ridiculous," one tester said. "I was expecting maybe $5 to $7."
Selection also was a problem for some as certain titles were found under curious categories. The "My Fair Lady" movie soundtrack was filed in the "Classical" music category. Same with the soundtrack from the Brad Pitt movie "Seven Years in Tibet."
Free sample clips
As they sit at their computers, test subjects can listen to clips of any song they want from the AlbumDirect catalog, using free "streaming" software from RealAudio. But users have to buy every track on the album if they want to download songs for keeps -- they can't save only the tunes they want. "Which sort of defeats the purpose and concept of being able to digitally download your music," one tester said.
Part of the appeal among the college students who cultivated the use of MP3 through high-speed dorm-room Internet access was that any song on CD could be posted and downloaded off the Web, copyright laws notwithstanding. Even now, companies such as San Diego-based MusicMatch, which makes MP3 jukebox software for PCs, market their products under the leitmotif "take control of your music."
Thus, some MP3 enthusiasts see AlbumDirect incorporating the worst of both conventional and online retailing -- lack of choice and inflated prices. But the experiment does offer legal, speedy delivery of files from some of the biggest names in the music business.
An entire CD, compressed with IBM's proprietary technology, takes 10 to 25 minutes to download depending on Internet network congestion. One of the secrets of fast delivery, at least for now, is Time Warner's cable-modem service, which like similar providers can give connection speeds as much as 100 times faster than conventional dial-up modems.
IBM has said it would test a way to deliver encrypted music via
conventional hookups at 56 kilobits per second. Until then, however, the medium of choice is the cable modem. (In addition to monthly cable bills, San Diego Road Runner customers pay $39.95 a month -- $49.95 if they're not Time Warner cable TV subscribers -- with a one-time installation fee of up to $129.95.)
Because the song files are enveloped with a digital anti-piracy wrapper, users have to play them on their PCs with AlbumDirect's proprietary software player. Users can't move AlbumDirect files directly to any of the portable digital MP3 players proliferating on the market or even, at least in one instance, move the files to another networked computer.
Chris Amow, a 30-year-old software engineer who is among the testers -- and who didn't mind revealing his name -- pulled his Hewlett-Packard CD writer out of the box one recent evening and, after a couple of reboots, had it running.
It took him an hour and a half before he could start ordering CDs, after verifying his AlbumDirect password, downloading all the necessary software, including the AlbumDirect player and RealNetworks' free G2 player, and performing the requisite reboots. Amow decided to download Tori Amos' 1992 release "Little Earthquakes." It was 7 p.m. on a weekday, a peak-use hour for Road Runner customers. Still, the 12-track CD arrived on his hard drive in less than 14 minutes.
The AlbumDirect recorder quickly downloaded and stored album-art graphics and highlighted which tracks were downloading. The recorder even allowed Amow to reschedule or cancel the order midstream. Because the album art and liner notes arrived first, he started printing while the songs were downloading. Things hit a snag, however, when he went to burn the CD for the first time. The writer conducted what it said was a one-time diagnostic, which doubled the time to put the files on a blank CD. All told, it took an additional 62 minutes to create the compact disc.
When all was said and done, Amow spent 2 1/2 hours buying and recording his first AlbumDirect CD. He could have bought the CD, then rented and watched a Blockbuster video in the same amount of time. However, subsequent procedures, from the time the computer boots up to when a user pulls a finished CD out of the CD writer, theoretically could take as little as 20 minutes, depending on Internet congestion and length of the album.
Security questions
IBM reportedly spent two years and $20 million developing what it calls the Electronic Music Management System, or EMMS, but the project took on urgency this year amid the explosive growth of MP3. In any case, the company has gone through great pains to make sure its own technology cannot be used to pirate music over the Internet. When asked about AlbumDirect's security measures, Amow shook his head. "I really don't see why I couldn't take these CD tracks and convert them to MP3s," he said. Indeed, he later converted some of the Tori Amos songs into MP3 files: "Yeah, it was no problem." IBM, the record labels and AlbumDirect are reluctant to talk about their Madison Project.
Max Martens, a spokesman with the public relations firm of Porter Novelli in Los Angeles, said AlbumDirect officials would not comment on any questions because the project is in its trial stage. He also declined to say when and where IBM's AlbumDirect plans a "narrowband" test for users with conventional 56K modems, as the company announced earlier this year. However, Martens said he guessed such tests would be in the San Diego area. Regarding cost, Martens said AlbumDirect is in charge and, "they do not discuss price."
Some of those inside the program are less reluctant. A doctor and avid online shopper is among the 1,000 testers in the county. He said he buys most of his books from Web sites such as Amazon.com and he still buys most of his CDs online -- but not through AlbumDirect. Although he has been a tester since June, he has only downloaded three CDs, two of which were freebies. "The novelty of this is pretty cool," he said. "I'm sort of a technophile. But would it replace my shopping elsewhere for CDs? Probably not, because of the price issue."
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