Subscription Music Service Coming To The Mac: Eventually

by , 1:30 PM EST, January 18th, 2002

Pressplay and other subscription music servers say they are coming to the Mac soon. A Reuters News article reports that Pressplay, an online subscription music service owned jointly by Sony and Vivendi Universal, will be available for the Mac sometime this year (2002). This from the article:

Pressplay, a Web music service owned by Sony Corp. and Vivendi Universal on Thursday said it hopes to make its online service available to Apple Computer Inc.'s Macintosh computers sometime this year.

"We are hoping that sometime this year that Pressplay will be available (on Macs), although we can't guarantee," said Andy Schuon, chief executive officer of Pressplay, during a conference call hosted by research firm Jupiter Media Metrix.

The article explains that, currently, all subscription music services are PC only, but that will change.

"The Apple is so consumer-friendly and it makes all the sense in the world to have these services on the Mac," said Karen Allen, an Internet consultant formerly with the Recording Association of America (RIAA). "If Pressplay is being offered through MSN music, MSN music would also get more subscribers if they were offered through the Mac so it would increase the revenue stream."

You can find more information in the full article from Reuters.

The Mac Observer Spin:

We are torn on this issue in that none of the subscription services available serve anyone's interests other than the recording industry's. All of the subscription services on the market seek to get people to listen to music the way the services want them to, instead of the way the customers want to. We hope that all of the current paradigms fail miserably, hopefully forcing the industry to pull its collective head out of its proverbial rear-end in the process. Copy-protection, limited duration files that expire after a month, non-MP3 formats, and you can't play them on your iPod... What's to like?

On the other hand, the fact that the industry is paying attention to the Mac, at last, speaks well of the platform. We just hope that this doesn't mean that we will soon see copy protection on CDs aimed at the Mac too.

In case we haven't made ourselves clear: the RIAA is out of control and needs to stop trying to suppress reality in order to hold on to their outmoded existence. We hope Pressplay either changes or dies a horrible death.