So it's not all that surprising that RealNetworks has started offering a number of paid services. After all, this is the company that started the whole Internet media revolution. Despite an ongoing war with Microsoft, it remains the most important player. But if the company's current paid offerings are the best it can do, I can't imagine how much longer RealNetworks will maintain that dominance.
Purely in the interest of science, I recently succumbed to Real's promotional efforts and signed up for something called RealOne SuperPass Gold, for which I'm paying--well, ZDNet is paying--US$19.95 a month.
The company also offers RealOne MusicPass, a subscription music service that's part of the recording industry's attempt to replace Napster with something it can control and charge for. For $9.95 a month (included in my SuperPass Gold), RealOne MusicPass gives you 100 downloads and 100 streams from a collection of music that changes monthly. But the service places some limits on what you can do with all that content. You can't copy it to a CD or MP3 player. You're only allowed to access the content from a single PC. And the content expires every 30 days.
As for the quality of that content, RealOne is part of MusicNet, so it has access to tunes from BMG, EMI, Warner, and Zomba. I was able to find a reasonable selection of music I like (though finding it wasn't always easy). You can also subscribe to premium sports packages. For $14.95, for example, you can get live broadcasts of Major League Baseball games all season long. If I were a baseball fan, that might be a decent deal.
One of the key selling points for the RealOne SuperPass is that much of the content it gives you access to is "exclusive." At first glance, the content doesn't seem all that exclusive. (For example, the site touts "24/7 exclusive access to CNN.com, ABCNEWS.com, E!, FOXSports.com & more.") More importantly, with all the content you can get for free on the Web, I didn't see anything worth paying for. (Except, well, me--CNET has its own RealOne channel, doubtless worth the entire price of admission.)
You need to use the RealOne client to access these services. I just don't like this software. It's overcrowded and ugly, right down to the avocado-green colour scheme. It also tries to do too many things--play discs, burn discs, manage devices, play Internet radio, manage and play your music collection, connect you to content channels, and probably a couple I've missed. There's even a Web browser, just in case you need one more of those.
Another for-pay service, Pressplay, available through MSN, Yahoo, and Roxio, is at the other end of the value spectrum. I gave Pressplay a spin after I played with RealOne. Then I went back and played with RealOne some more, just to confirm my earlier findings. After playing with Pressplay, I liked RealOne a lot less than I had initially. While I can't recommend the RealNetworks product to anyone, Pressplay is quite decent.
Pressplay does not try to be all things to all users. It's just about playing, downloading, and--yipes!--burning music. Yes, Pressplay allows you to burn about an album's worth of music every month, though you can't include more than two cuts from any particular artist.
The service--I tried the MSN version, though I'm told they're all pretty similar--costs from $9.95 to $24.95 a month. The high-end subscription lets you burn 20 songs (as opposed to 10 for the basic plan), which makes it a reasonably good deal compared with running down to the record store. Even though you can't burn an entire CD of one artist, there's something to be said for compilation discs.
Pressplay has ties to EMI, Sony, and Universal, which seem to offer many more artists I like than the MusicNet combination at RealMusic. After about an hour playing with the software, I'd already downloaded almost a dozen songs. To be fair, most of them already exist somewhere around my house--if only I could find the CDs in the giant stacks that comprise my music "library."
Because it doesn't try to do so much, the Pressplay client is clean and simple to navigate. It made finding, downloading, burning, and playing music easy. One thing I especially liked was the ability to play the downloaded music using either the Pressplay client or Windows Media Player. (No, you can't use Media Player to burn the music to a CD. I tried.)
If I were competing with Microsoft, I'd probably take the same soup-to-nuts, all-things-to-all-media approach that RealNetworks has. I just hope I'd be able to create a client that wasn't such a mess. As for Pressplay, while I'm not wild about a music service that won't let me actually keep the music I've downloaded or copy it to my MP3 player, I think it's got promise.
What do you think? Are play-for-pay services worth it? Do you subscribe to any? Like them/hate them? TalkBack below!
