If there’s a silver bullet for distributing music online, Puretracks.com hasn’t found it.

I mentioned some time ago that I had enjoyed shopping online with my nifty new Mastercard. Contrary to the accusation that shopping on the Internet would encourage careless spending, I found that it allowed me to be much more educated about a purchase, since I could click to dozens of review sites and forums to get the general consensus on a product.

I haven’t bought anything since my new Laser Printer, since I haven’t had occasion. Today, however, I got a moo-ing milk carton for lunch which contained a $5 online music voucher. I was disappointed to not win the Mazda obviously, but it seemed like a good opportunity to form an opinion of ’small purchase download vending’.

As above, it was disappointing. I appreciated the ‘30-second’ preview of each song, but I was annoyed by the inability to do more complicated queries, such as ‘Show me the top 40 most popular songs by number of downloads in subcategory X’, rather than just a general ‘This Week’s Top 100′ listings and by album/artist. Perhaps I was just prejudiced, because the site forced me to use IE instead of Firefox.

I really had a much more positive experience several weeks ago when I purchased the track ‘Feeling the Love’ from the band Reactor’s home page. Of course, the motivation and situation were different. With Reactor, I could have stolen the track, but I paid them the $0.99 to support a group breaking away from the record company bureaucracy. On Puretracks, I was looking to buy any $5 worth of tunes, and ended up with four that I could just as easily have leeched. Except that instead of getting real, normal MP3s, they’re these strange WMA files that require some kind of wierd online authentication to play. Can I even burn these to a disc?

Perhaps much as the open-source movement has changed the way software is distributed (I’ll take OpenOffice over Word any day), groups like Reactor will change the face of the music industry.

The question will still remain, though: Is it financially viable? Will artists’ websites be plastered with corporate sponsorship? Can live concerts, shows, and fan donations really pay the bills for these adults and their families? Probably not… so the model still needs some work. But in the meantime, it’s an uphill battle for the Empire against Peer-2-Peer. Kazaa has been successfully destroyed, but in its place, several more clients vie for the top position, not to mention the almighty Bittorrent.

Mike

← Earlier Later → Posted at 12:00 pm to Internet.