The online music retail market is slowly catching up with what its customers have wanted for years.  While the iTunes Music Store leads sales with its relatively low-quality, DRM-encumbered files, many customers have for a long time been asking for an open subscription model.  Under this scheme, you would pay a regular amount to gain access to an unlimited number of DRM-free downloads that you can keep forever.  It finally looks like we might be getting there.

Subscription plans have existed for a few years now and they’ve all had drawbacks.  Napster offer unlimited downloads for a monthly fee, but the tracks are DRM-wrapped Windows Media Audio files which won’t play on iPods and expire if you stop paying.  eMusic offer unprotected high-quality MP3 files to keep forever but there’s a strict monthly download limit and the choice of music is quite limited, especially outside the USA.

In the mobile space MusicStation is a service that allows unlimited downloads but again it is DRM-encumbered and music is locked to the customer’s phone with no way to transfer the music to a computer.  Nokia’s Comes With Music has just launched and is another DRM-protected, unlimited downloads scheme.  Once again though, the music is locked to one phone although you can copy it to one computer and you do get to keep it forever.  It’s good, but it’s not the DRM-free, unlimited ideal.

It’s understandable that the music industry wouldn’t want to take the risk of licensing their content for such a Utopian dream.  They’d be too scared of helping all the illegal filesharers out there.  It looks like some of them have taken the plunge though.

Datz is a new subscription service offering that ideal of unlimited MP3 downloads with no restrictions.  If you’re prepared to pay £99 per year you get a USB dongle that you plug into the computer you want to download music on.  You can only download music from a computer with the dongle in but once you’ve got the music you can copy it and play it wherever you like.

There are still some teething problems.  The software used to download the tracks is Windows only (although a Mac version seems to be planed for the near future) and some of the biggest record companies such as Universal aren’t on board.  EMI, Warners and Beggars Group are though, so there’s plenty of content you’ll have heard of on there.

So, is your favourite band available on Datz?  Once you buy into the service there’s a search facility available in the software but finding out if it has the music you want beforehand is difficult.  Their site only offers an A to Z of artists and a genre search.  Searching for well-known bands i difficult as there are so many little-known artists out there.  I’m not a Coldplay fan but they are a popular EMI act, so are they on there?  You have to search through page after page of artists beginning with ‘C’.  After a while I discovered Chaka Demus & Pliers are on Datz, as are unknowns like Cinema 33 and Cocobongo.  On and on I went clicking through page after page.  44 pages in I finally found Coldplay, but only seven tracks are available!

Datz definitely need to point potential customers in the direction of their best-known content rather than confusing them with long lists of obscure artists.  Those ‘premium’ artists definitely need complete catalogues too.  Imagine paying £99 and discovering most of the music you wanted wasn’t there.

Hopefully Datz will iron out these problems.  Introduce a search facility to the website and if there’s enough music I want on there I’ll happily sign up.  It’s expensive up front but as long as there’s lots of good content to download it’ll pay for itself in no time.  Let’s face it, most serious music fans will spend a lot more than £99 per year on music.  If it’s successful the remaining majors will get on board and it will be an amazing proposition for anyone with even a moderate interest in music.

Datz is definitely one to watch.