While swapping pirated songs on file sharing networks is very populair and free, a consortium of five companies will be launching a new legal music download site. Musicnet, Pressplay and Listen.com are already offering these kind of services, but are for now not really popular.
The new group that will be called Echo excists partly of retailers and they think they have a better look at the market and will be succesfull because they know the customers. Besides that they want to be; "better then free".
Beadle said that the retailers will succeed where others have failed because retailers know how to market to the consumer. In addition to Echo, Best Buy also is looking at other online music distribution options, she said. |
Matt Graves, spokesman for Listen.com, said retailers' involvement is a good sign that the marketplace is growing. Listen.com offers a Net-based music service for $9.95 a month called Rhapsody, which offers consumers an expansive library of songs that they can play on a "jukebox" they download to their PC. Listen.com is one of the few companies that has licensing agreements with all five music publishers as well as 110 independent labels. Burning music onto a CD costs an additional 99 cents.
The retailers are following the "better than free" trend in online music distribution, said Michael Bracy, spokesman for the Future of Music Coalition, a musician advocacy organization based in Washington D.C. That means offering more value with downloads, such as song recommendations.
Read the entire story here. Discuss these kind of subjects in our CD Freaks LivingRoom!
Source: Startribune
