By Eric Witherspoon
At first glance, SonyMusic.com is a mish-mashed manifestation of
Sony's multiple music labels-Columbia, Epic, Legacy, Sony Nashville
and Sony Classical among others. They're all owned by Sony, so someone
in corporate seemed to think it would be a good idea to stick them
all together on a website and link that site to the main Sony.com
home page.
Indeed, like a great many corporate sites, SonyMusic.com fails to
deliver a very compelling experience for consumers and comes across
instead as an online clearinghouse for Sony Music news and information.
One reason that SonyMusic.com fails to really engage surfers is that
it is such a jumble of genres. Click on "Artists" to read
about Pearl Jam, the re-release of South Pacific, Yo-Yo Ma and Dixie
Chicks. Or click on "Music" to hear clips of Ricky Martin,
Benny Goodman, Lil Bow Wow or Michael Bolton listed one after another.
There is no coherent message here.
Another problem is that whatever content is available has been sliced
into 30 second sound bytes. A tour through SonyMusic's audio and video
clip library is a frustrating foreshadowing of a Napster-less world.
After the P-to-P revolution, it's painful to imagine going back to
the ancien regime (even as a restoration is in the works).
I understand that Sony does not want digital versions of its copy-protected
music zipping through cyberspace, but can't I at least listen to a
single Frank Sinatra song from start to finish via streaming audio?
I doubt that many listeners have the time or expertise to convert
streaming RealAudio files to some sort of swappable digital format
like MP3. And besides, I can listen to streaming full-length songs
all the time from radio stations that stream their programming on
the web. Offering 30-second music clips just strikes me as a colossal
waste-they're too short to be of any entertainment value and just
long enough to be a hassle and cause my computer to freeze. And maybe
even worse, it just seems downright stingy.
So is that the final verdict on SonyMusic.com? For now, yes. But
maybe SonyMusic.com is waiting for something big to happen.
In May of 2000, Sony announced a joint venture with Universal Music
to develop an online music subscription system to compete with Napster.
According to a February 23, 2001 Wall Street Journal article, Vivendi
Universal expects that system will be ready to roll out this summer.
Maybe then a unified SonyMusic.com website makes sense-especially
if Sony can tie its digital content to its digital consumer products
through a single web-based platform. If you need music for your Sony
Digital Walkman, Sony Vaio or Sony Handheld, go to SonyMusic.com.
There is a section of the current SonyMusic website that hints at
some of these future possibilities. It's called "The Lab."
Right now, the most intriguing feature is something called CDExtra
that purports to combine the worlds of music and multimedia. CDExtra
CDs, of which there are a few dozen by popular artists, offer free
interactive multimedia experiences and exclusive content when played
in a computer's CD-ROM drive. I don't have a CDExtra CD to test drive,
but it sure sounds neat to me.
Of course the real entertainment payoff is if CDExtra's online content
really enhances and enriches the listening experience. For all the
promise of interactivity with DVDs only a handful of releases have
really added value to the viewing experience. If CDExtra or other
online content from Sony helps me listen to music in a new way, then
it's really worth something-maybe even money.