Napster schedules its UK launch for the end of the summer

March 4, 2004

While
music download services are becoming widespread throughout the US,
Europe only has a few at present. Napster will launch its service in the
end of the summer in the
UK. Their launch date is later than Apple's
expected launch during the second quarter and while Napster is aiming for the
UK;
Europe's largest music market, Apple plans to start its
service across a number of European countries. Currently O2 and Wippit are the only main
active legal download services running in
Europe.

Napster's
UK service
expects to feature localised content, genres and promotions. The
UK has even seen
an increase in CD sales despite having not yet target individuals with lawsuits
unlike the
US. Despite the album sales rise, CD single sales are falling rapidly
thus Napster may help in this area.
No pricing for Napster's
UK service has
been announced yet. Quakester2000 submitted the
following news from The Register via our
news
submit :

Napster will launch a service dedicate to UK music buyers by "the end of summer", the company revealed today.

Such a date puts it behind
Apple's iTunes Music Store, which is expected to launch in Europe during
Q2. The Apple service is also expected to cover a number of European
territories and not just the UK.

However, Napster's
country-by-country scheme will have made the appropriate rights
negotiations more simple. It is also targeting Europe's largest market and
the world's third largest after the US and Japan. UK CD sales continued to
grow throughout the industry's P2P crisis of the early noughties.

To date, the only download
service active in Europe is O2, which has close connections with the music
industry. Commercial P2P company Wippit is slowly adding major-label
catalogue: most recently it signed with EMI, its second major label.

Napster parent Roxio - which
already has a UK presence - said it had appointed one Leanne Sharman as
general manager of the UK version of Napster. She's no relation to Sharman
Networks, we trust.

The service's UK incarnation
will feature localised content, genres and promotions, the company said.
No word yet on pricing, however.

Ireland
has an online Music download service through Eircom;
Ireland's main
telephone provider. While it offers
a good selection of music, it charges a fairly high price of €1.39 per track and
up to around €28 per album! They
also offer song streaming at 1 cent per track and temporary downloads for 10
cent per song which cannot be burned to CD or transferred. For singles this service is worth it
since high street CD singles cost €5 per single although high street albums are
typically priced around €20; a lot cheaper than downloading them online.

It will
be interesting to see which pricing Napster charges per download. Some predict that their pricing will be 99p per song
like the US' 99c
a track. Feel free to discuss and read
more about online music services on our Music Downloads, P2P & Legal
Issues Forum.

Source: The Register