Qualifying and Quantifying Quality

Quality (generally) and the quality-versus-cost tradeoff (specifically) are themes that I encounter daily in my job. Quality-versus-cost is what guides my forecast of how the industry push towards blue laser-based optical storage is likely to play out; more about that in another post. It's also a concept that has popped into my noggin each time I've run across MusicGiants, an audio download distribution startup that I first heard about in mid-May, and that formally launched its service a month back.

Unlike other online music stores like Connect (ATRAC), iTunes (DRM'd AAC), or Microsoft lossy codec-powered merchants such as MSN Music, Napster, Real Rhapsody, or Yahoo's MusicMatch and Music Unlimited, MusicGiants employs the lossless compression variant of the Windows Media 9 audio codec suite. For….you guessed it, CD-exact audio quality. And for that privilege, you pay….$1.29 per track (most), or $15.29 per album (again, most), according to the FAQ on the company website. Oh yeah, and you also pay a $50/per year membership fee (which is offset by $50 in track purchase credits for the first year).

MusicGiants claims to provide "content licensed by the 4 major labels, EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner Music Group", but I can't find any stats on the breadth of its catalog; you can search for your favourite artists here. The FAQ is also quite 'light' on any specifics regarding the restrictions imposed by its implementation of Microsoft's DRM, but PC Magazine's review claims you can play the tracks on up to 5 PCs at a time. Unfortunately, PC Magazine's review also fleshes out the paucity of portable player support that I've suspected since I first caught wind of the company's plans a half year back…only bulky, power-hungry and expensive (not to mention near-obsolete) Portable Media Center units such as iRiver's PMC-120, Creative Labs' Zen Portable Media Center, and Samsung's Yepp YH-999 get the nod. Fortunately, you are also allowed to burn CDs (generous, aren't they?).

So let's compare and contrast. First, there's iTunes, which has no membership fee and offers 99 cent tracks that you can play back on a $100 iPod shuffle; more generally you can authorize DRM'd content on up to five computers at a time, along with an unlimited number of iPods. Then there's my favourite subscription service, Yahoo Music Unlimited, which for $60/year ($120/year beginning next month, unless you don't need to download subscription tracks to a portable player, in which case the $60/year price will continue) lets you play more than a million (as of mid-May) tracks of music on up to three computers at once (and stream the content from them via Windows Media Connect); each computer can sync that content to up to three portable music players. Subscription music player support is ever-growing, and you can also buy tracks at 79 cents each.

Now balance those services and their features against the more expensive (around 50% more expensive on a per-album basis than buying the CD on sale from a local music store or online merchant) and usage-limited ability to listen to music free of lossy-compression artifacts that you probably won't notice, anyway. Is there a market for MusicGiants? Yeah, among cost-is-no-object audiophiles. These are the people who, at the two-day optical storage panel series I attended at AES earlier this month, insisted that the reason DVD-Audio failed is because it didn't support 24-bit, 192 kHz audio across all six surround channels….or that "those darn kids" would grow tired of AAC's "lousy quality" and embrace AIFF and WAV once they threw away their iPods' cheap headphones in favour of better ones (ignoring the fact that kids don't want to throw away their cheap, white, trendy iPod headphones, or to store 1/10^th  to 1/20^th the music in their players that they can now, and that given the high ambient noise level when they listen to their music and the lack of concentrated attention they give to their music, additional quality would be a waste of money). Is it a big enough market to sustain MusicGiants? I dunno. But is lossless audio a trend that's going to gain momentum in the future? I wouldn't count on it.

Good luck, MusicGiants. You'll need it.