TPV: What is the focus of your catalog?

Scott Bahneman: Quite wide ranging. We’ve licensed music from Sony, BMG, Warner, Universal, EMI; we’re now working on some independent labels. Classic rock mostly; we haven’t knocked ourselves out to have the most music downloads, but have concentrated on quality.

TPV: Many users have considered DRM a thorn in their side since its inception, but many on the business side of the music industry see it as property-protection. How does MusicGiants view the whole DRM controversy and how do you deal with it in your download service?

Scott Bahneman: Most everything we have, about 500,000 tracks, are all protected, WMA DRM and WMA lossless. We’re offering all 13 tracks from Paul McCartney’s new album Memory Almost Full DRM-free. But we leave it to the owners themselves to make that decision. And many are deciding to go without DRM. By end of the summer, we believe we’ll have the largest collection of lossless non-DRM available. We want to support what the content owners would like to do. So we do it both ways. Time will tell whether it has a big impact. EMI is experimenting with it. The industry is now taking a wait and see attitude.

TPV: In the eyes of audio enthusiasts who have the reputation for being sticklers for audio quality, the iPod generation seems to settle for lower-res downloads for the sake of convenience. Do your customer demographics support this notion, or do you see movement toward a demand for high-quality over convenience? Any reason a consumer couldn’t have both?

Scott Bahneman: The Microsoft Vista platform now allows you to handle master files in high-res. That means you can buy 100 percent of what the music is as recorded and have the ability to down-res it. That means we’ve crossed a threshold.

When you go up from 128kbps up to 256kbps, people notice the difference. At 64kbps, the resolution of a typical 30-second demo clip, sound is puny and miserable. When you jump from 256kbps up to lossless, which is where we are at 1100kbps, that’s four times more resolution. That’s the kind of resolution you notice on speakers and good quality headphones. And we go further. We’ve licensed over 1,000 titles in DVD-Audio and SACD formats; ten times more robust than two-channel stereo. That’s our Super HD offering.

Super HD is very distinguishable. It’s very rich, very warm; it reminds you of vinyl but its 3D and mostly in surround sound. We have a small offering up now, and are in middle of mastering and coding more releases. This takes time, but it’s well worth it. Audiophiles are the folks who have the gear for this. A recent CEA report notes that more than 40,000 homes in the U.S. have 5.1 channel systems.

People normally watch TV and movies with 5.1 surround; now they can enjoy music with the investment they’ve already made. Super HD will work on any PC with Windows XP or above (Vista) or Windows Media Edition software. So if you put a high-quality sound card on these PCs, you can plug them right into your stereo system.

NEXT: “It’s just silly to plug the iPod into a home stereo; it’ll work, but it doesn’t make sense.”

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