Online consumer: The Cybersound of Music - online sound recording retailers

Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine, Jan, 1999 by Elizabeth Razzi, Sean O'Neill

* The online music stores have plenty of differences-starting with price.

All that's missing is the sullen cashier with the pierced eyebrow. If you can do without that, you'll find a lot to like browsing music stores online. The best sites combine the joys of flipping through a good music magazine with those of wandering around a well-stocked store--without the hassle of driving to the mall. Plus, you'll often beat the prices you find at the bricks-and-mortar stores.

That helps explain the growing popularity of online music stores. Though their share of the music market is still small--about 2% of 1998 revenues, projects Jupiter Communications, a New York City research firm--online revenues will grow to 9% of the market by 2002, according to Jupiter estimates. Amazon.com, whose music department debuted in June, quickly overtook the competition in sales, another indication of pent-up demand.

But prices aren't always lower online, and the instant gratification of finding and ordering CDs from your desktop can turn into frustrating waits for the music to reach your mailbox. At the four online music stores I visited, there were also differences in how much fun it was to browse the virtual shelves.

BEST OVERALL

Music Boulevard

It was a tough call deciding which was the better site--CDnow (www.cdnow.com) or Music Boulevard (www .musicboulevard.com)--but a better browsing experience tips the scales toward Music Boulevard. The issue may become moot, anyway, because CDnow and Music Boulevard's parent, N2K, announced a merger in October. There's no word yet on how the sites will be combined, but the companies' combined firepower is expected to give Amazon.com a run for its money.

CDnow and Music Boulevard came pretty close on prices, undercutting both Amazon.com (by a little) and Tower (by a lot). On blues great John Lee Hooker's new release, The Best of Friends (a socko album with Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, Bonnie Raitt and Carlos Santana), Music Boulevard offered the best price, $10.88 (plus $2.99 for shipping, which is pretty standard among the sites). The disk cost $11.88 at CDnow (and didn't come up in a search by artist), $11.88 at Amazon.com and a whopping $17.99 at Tower.

Another plus for Music Boulevard is its Frequent Buyer's Club. Signing up is free (but you have to complete a detailed survey). Then, with ten purchases, you earn credit for one free CD. I wasn't terribly impressed with CDnow's bonus plan, the Fast Forward Reward Program. The cheapest reward, 500 points ($50 spent on music), gets you a greatest-hits CD from the MTV Video Music Awards 1984-1997. Yawn.

Music Boulevard had the best downloadable music clips, too. As at the other sites, you can hear 30-second clips of lots of tracks via RealAudio streaming, but frequently you can also choose between low-quality MPEG and high-quality MPEG format. MPEG takes longer to download than RealAudio, but it has a much better sound. Music Boulevard has music reviews from publications such as Allstar and SPIN that tend to be more substantive than the one- or two-liners on other sites.

The other sites had kids' titles, but good luck finding them. Music Boulevard has a whole kids' section, with reviews and audio clips--so you can check out The Playground by Tony Bennett (with Rosie O'Donnell and Sesame Street's Elmo and Kermit the Frog) before you pay $12.99 and commit to hearing it hundreds of times on your car stereo.

SPEEDIEST

Tower Records

When I searched Tower Records (www.towerrecords.com) for John Lee Hooker's CD, it was just before its release. The prospect of being the first mom on the block to own a copy made the $17.99 plus $2.95 shipping seem reasonable.

I ordered the CD shortly before midnight on the Thursday before the Tuesday release date. As with all the Web sites, I promptly received an e-mail confirmation of the order. Sure enough, the CD popped through the front-door mail slot before noon on the release date.

Tower beat the other sites on delivery time by at least two (and in one case, six) days. At Music Boulevard I was foiled in trying to place a late-night order for an upcoming Tuesday release. The online store was "closed" Thursday night and again Friday morning, so I couldn't browse or get my order in by 9 A.M., the cut-off time for prerelease sales. A few days later, I ordered an R.E.M. title, Up ($11.88), scheduled for release the following Tuesday. It arrived two days after release.

CDnow was more like CDlater. The disc that I had ordered before midnight the Thursday before release date, Deana Carter's Everything's Gonna Be Alright ($12.99), arrived three days after release. Amazon was the slowest. I preordered the upcoming remastered release of an early Aretha Franklin gospel recording, You Grow Closer ($11.49). It arrived six days after the release date.

Tower may be fast, but impatience has its price: The John Lee Hooker title was cheaper everywhere else. (Tower later put the CD on sale for $13.99--still pricier than its competitors.) In fact, Tower's prices were the highest across the board. Even the most heavily promoted new releases, such as Sheryl Crow's Globe Sessions and the Goo Goo Dolls' Dizzy Up the Girl, were $13.99 each at Tower--the same as in their downtown store, where you don't have to pay for shipping--and more than a dollar higher than elsewhere on the Web.