Closing the Sale

As of this writing, the main way of selling music over the Web still involves mailing CDs. And friends, there are plenty of CDs out there for the mailing. You can buy music from huge retailers like Amazon or CDNow, from smaller specialty retailers (Importcd.com, SLCD.COM, http://tclimports.com/), or from small regional distributors (bluescds.com). You can also buy directly from record companies - some but not all of the majors have their own online stores, and quite a few smaller labels do - or even directly from some (mostly unsigned) artists' Web sites. To say nothing of the many less traditional outlets (usually thought of as "Web sites" rather than as "companies") such as MP3.com, iuma.com and so on. You can dip your spoon into the river of distribution at many points.

Must a record company sell CDs on their own site? Should they? After all, you can't walk into the front office of a record company and buy a CD, can you? Why not leave the mailing and credit card processing (and returns and hassles) to the retailers? This is a question that lots of companies are asking these days, in many fields of commerce: Is it worth pissing off our traditional distribution partners to explore our e-commerce options, and are we better off selling on our own site, or working with an online retailer? Ever-increasing specialization is what the economy of the 00s is all about, so most companies will decide sooner or later that it doesn't pay to lick their own stamps.

Ah, but wait! When it comes to music, someday there'll be no stamps to lick! When music is distributed as bits over the Internet, who knows what the distribution channels will look like? One thing seems certain: producers and consumers are going to be closer than ever before, and the middlemen are going to look a lot different. Anyone involved in the music business, from record companies to distributors to retailers, needs to stay up on the latest trends in e-commerce, or risk going belly-up.

When it comes to the mechanics of ordering, selling CDs over the Web is no different than selling books or other small objects. For information on setting up a basic e-commerce site, see the WDVL E-commerce section, as well as the various e-commerce articles in The Web Developer's Journal and the Internet.com E-commerce Channel. Get yourself a merchant account and a big roll of stamps, and start licking!

But what if you're ready to jump right into the next wave? What if you've got bits ready to ship, and aren't into licking stamps? How can you sell music digitally on the Internet? Theoretically, it's simple enough - just provide buyers with a password or "key" that unlocks a Web page where they can download the songs they've bought. The snag is that this simple process provides no form of copy protection. Once somebody has bought a song, they could make copies and sell them to everyone in China.

The major record companies tend to be keen on copy protection. Never mind that most software isn't copy protected, and neither are CDs (Remember DAT tapes? There is or was a copy protection circuit included in "consumer" DAT machines, which was made moot when it became apparent that DAT would never catch on as a consumer medium). The majors are not likely to get into digital distribution in a big way until there's some sort of standard copy-protection scheme in place.

At the moment, there are several different systems out there for selling music "securely" over the Internet. Most of them are more or less proprietary to a particular retail outlet. Mjuice for example, touts its own special type of encrypted MP3 file, called an "MJF". An MJF can be played an infinite number of times, but only on a registered user's player, and can't be copied. The trouble is, you have to have a special MJuice-compatible MP3 player.

One scheme that seems to have gained a certain amount of acceptance at various sites is Liquid Audio. Liquid Audio is an encoded streaming format that touts itself as a complete end-to-end music distribution platform. It incorporates copy protection and even a system for keeping track of performing rights licenses. It's quite impressive, and I've mentioned it in several articles before. The only snag? You guessed it - it only works with the Liquid Audio Player.

Sample This!
Digital Distribution of Music
Closing the Sale - Part 2