JB Hi-Fi NOW - but mobiles LATER

CLOUDS' ILLUSIONS

Have you bought a house, or do you rent? It’s nice to own — you can do anything you like with it, and there’s a certain pride of ownership. Renting is probably a bit cheaper by the month, but you can’t bang holes in the wall, and once you stop paying, you have nothing left.

It’s not so different with music. Buy it, and you can do anything you like with it. Rent it, and it comes with limitations. But at least Australians are now getting the choice, with music subscription services surfacing thick and fast after a two-year lag on what has been happening in the US and Europe.

So JB Hi-fi has launched JB Hi-Fi NOW.  

Sony has its global ‘Music Unlimited’/Qriocity, and also the local Songl, a refreshed version of Anubis.fm (now with a 320kbps feed after earlier poor sonics, see EdLines April 2011).

Samsung has Music Hub; Microsoft is still plugging away with Zune, launching the Zune Pass. Rumours are firming that Spotify and Rdio will get Australian launches in 2012, while Apple’s iCloud shows distinct signs of presaging a subscription option for iTunes.

All these services are distinguished from the likes of Last.FM and the still-US-only Pandora by accessing exactly the albums/tracks you want, rather than just creating ‘radio stations’ around the style of a specific artist.

On the other hand they all demand subscription prices, from JB Hifi’s $25 a quarter to more than double that. And the higher the price, the more the subscription service needs to justify itself as a genuine alternative to purchase. Assuming you don’t want to pay more, will you stop buying music to keep, and simply subscribe?

Potential downsides are quality, availability, and universal access. Streaming music quality is currently 320kbps at its best, at worst 128kbps. Some music will not be available — try searching for The Beatles or a favourite local band. As for playability, if a subscription is to be your main access to music, you will want to access it at home, at work, in the car, on the bus, when out for a run.

Yet JB’s service, for example, is strictly limited to four specified devices — restrictive for a portable service. Users may not clock this during their free month trial, because JB Hi-Fi NOW has been launched without its mobile component. Log on using your smartphone and you get a message that "JB Hi-Fi NOW is not available on mobile devices" - and that includes iPad.

Heaven forbid that JB is holding back on the mobile service to avoid the inevitable stories that "my music subscription cost me $3000 in excess data charges" - it's more likely that the mobile component of the service simply isn't working yet. Or that the copyright fees the company is likely to be paying out for all its free trials will be limited by a home-only delivery.  

Pure, the digital radio makers, came knocking recently to show us their upcoming subscription offering, which launches in the UK right about the time you’ll read this, and should get an Australian launch in 2012. While you may know Pure as the purveyors of fine digital radios, the company behind them is the impressive and patent-strong Imagination Technologies, which has IP of some sort embedded in smartphones everywhere, and is 10% owned by Apple, making its subscription service an interesting one to watch.

Pure has already implemented a songs-for-sale site, where you buy songs and play them on demand via your radio (or, more usefully, through any browser). It also has ‘music recognition’ built in, using Shazam’s impossibly brilliant system to identify and ‘Tag’ any track you may hear, then allowing quick and easy purchase.

Now comes Pure Music, a full-functionality subscription service. We were given a pre-release invitation, and have been listening via both a Pure Contour Flow radio and, more critically, on a Mac linked via high-quality DACs to some decent hi-fi. What think we?

Well, as subscriptions go, this looks like a good ’un, especially if they can hit the suggested $9.99 a month (or less) when it launches in Australia. It currently has a few minor issues operationally (though of course this is early days), but it sounded good streaming at 192kbps, it had a fairly full roster of artists and, as with the likes of Rhapsody and the others, it’s a fantastic way to keep in touch with new releases.

So, is it enough to persuade anyone to stop buying music any other way? Perhaps. But only if, as our columnist Derek Powell likes to say, a good many technological stars all align.

First of all, can we use our subscription music service absolutely anywhere? For most people, the answer will currently be no. You can’t put it on an iPod. (Pure does let you buy songs, at 320kbps and DRM free, but that defeats the subscription concept.) To hear Pure Music through your hi-fi, you will need your computer (or a Pure Flow digital radio) plugged into your hi-fi, preferably through a DAC. To hear it on the go, you’ll need to be streaming data continuously to your smartphone, and as mentioned above, we all know what kind of trouble continuous mobile data downloading can get you in. You’ll need a reliably large data plan, and a good battery life.

Then there’s the quality debate — streaming is getting better, with more respectable data rates, but it’s still not CD quality.

In a nutshell, subscription music can only work as a standalone music source if every music playback system you own is connected to the internet. Is that you? I’m pretty networked up at home, but it’s certainly not me. Not yet, anyway. Which makes streaming just an additional source, for additional money, which is no doubt why the record companies are supporting lots of them, since they still haven’t concocted a successful model for selling their music online. (A hint, guys — cut the track prices by 80%.)

Lastly, I can’t help remembering Nokia’s Comes With Music service, which I used for several years, ending up with lots of music that could be played only on one PC and one Nokia phone. Then my subscription ended, that PC went bung, and I was left with absolutely nothing.

The cloud model probably is the future, or at least a future. And very handy it may be.

But clouds are insubstantial things — ice-cream castles in the air. They dissipate when heat rises; they precipitate their contents without warning and leave you unexpectedly drenched. Dear Joni Mitchell would have done so many things, but clouds got in her way.

Still, with a bit of luck we’ll soon work out how to hack these various clouds and keep all the music for ourselves as well. Sometimes you just have to bang holes in the wall, and hope you get away with it.

Jez Ford, Editor, Sound+Image