• by Ross Fadner , November 10, 2003

It's been a while since the online medium has spawned anything resembling - dare we say - a dot-com advertising boom, but that's just what appears to be coming out of a sudden marketing war surrounding premium download music services. The services, which are the legitimate successors of the Napster era of illegal peer-to-peer file sharing services, seem to be launching daily, replete with heavy consumer advertising budgets.

Major players include RealNetworks' Rhapsody, Apple's iTunes, and Roxio's revamped Napster service, but such biggies as Sony Corp, Viacom's MTV Networks and Wal-Mart Stores are said to be poised to launch competing services.

Apple, Roxio, and RealNetworks have already launched ad campaigns for their respective services. Familiarly, each campaign is directed towards differentiating their service from their pay-for competitors.

RealNetworks' campaign features TV spots produced by Sofia Coppola's production agency and will be their first national television effort. The commercial will focus on a television pole that becomes increasingly plastered with more and more promotional posters for various artists and groups such as Bob Dylan and Radiohead. Eventually, the posters fill up the pole and the entire space surrounding it. The message will be something to the effect of "You can have it all," or "15,000 bands at one venue," which is the overall tone and message of the ad campaign that also features online and possibly print ads.

Roxio, which purchased the rights to revive Napster for $20 million, is announcing its reemergence with a flurry of TV and print ads flashing its familiar "kittyhead" logo of a cat with headphones on. One wonders, however, whether it's smart to re-launch a branding image that became synonymous with music piracy for so many years.

RealNetworks, meanwhile, announced a new co-branding effort with Comcast on Monday that will provide a direct link to Comcast's purported 2.5 million site users-around half of Comcast's overall broadband consumer base. During a special promotion, Comcast subscribers who go to the Rhapsody site will receive a seven day free trial run of the service and 10 free songs to download.

The Comcast partnership brings "the advantage of communicating with people who already have a broadband connection," noted Greg Chiemingo, vice president-corporate communications, RealNetworks. A high-speed connection, of course, is certainly more favorable for downloading music and people with broadband and DSL connections will be the audience RealNetworks is primarily targeting.

Chiemingo said the RealNetworks' ad campaign will feature a good mix of online, TV and print ads, but does not specifically target any specific demographic. "There is a big broadband audience out there," he noted, "it's not necessarily just college students and younger kids-they are an important audience of course but part of a much bigger picture."

Despite the explosive popularity of such services, paid online music distributors still face the challenge of convincing a generation of music fans who have become very accustomed to getting their music for free to suddenly pay for it. Why would they want to do that?

"History is full of new technologies, new markets, new opportunities. People race in with new ideas, and then there is shakeout," observed Larry McNaughton, chief operating officer of brand consultancy agency CoreBrand LLC. He said the rush to enter the paid online music business reminds him of the coffee store boom of the last five to seven years when many copycats appeared only to vanish in the wake of Starbucks Corporation's rise to global coffee market dominance.