EMI to offer 140.000 songs online in Europe

The record company EMI is launching their European online music download store. EMI is now boasting that their site is the largest music download service in Europe, by a record company.
EMI has teamed up with more that 20 outfits including Freeserve, BT, and Tiscali to flog its music online in Europe, the music giant announced today.
..
Once purchased, punters will be able to burn music onto CD-R or copy tracks to portable players. They will also be able to buy singles online as soon as the songs are played on the radio ahead of their full commercial CD launch.
There’s a clear shift in the attitude of music industry towards online music distribution, but what took them so long? Ever since Napster many people are now used to free and virtually unlimited music access on the Internet, even though illegal. Did the recording industry wait just a few years too long?

The Register

Written by: Lasse Penttinen @ 24 Apr 2003 14:25
Advertisement - News comments available below the ad
  • 1 comment

  • A_Klingon

    Isn't this the thing I just joined two weeks ago, and then dumped as soon as my free 'points' ran out?

    You buy 'credits' with your bank card. How many credits it actually takes to GET some stuff is way more than what their literature describes.

    No credits (0) to stream 30-second's-worth of music to see if it's really the track you want. One credit (1) to stream the full song once. Ten credits (ten) to download the song to your computer in crippled .wma format, which means if you don't remain a paying subscriber, or buy a new hard drive, or you have a system crash, you can say 'bye-bye' to all your music.

    One Hundred (100) credits to download a burnable track, and get the damn thing off your computer to where it's safe.

    In practice, some of the tracks required over 200 credits to download. (I think one particular Bee Gee's track cost 205 credits). Anyway, you will be Told which tracks you may download as 'open' tracks - *many* key songs are only available as crippled ones.

    Also, some album tracks are available individually, or all-together, as one full album. One would <sortof> suspect that if you're willing to purchase the *whole* album outright, you might get a wee bit of a discount over downloading all the tracks separately, but you often don't. It's cheaper, credits-wise, to get the tracks separately. Carefully check the 'credits-cost' first before downloading anything!

    (Anybody else have experiences with these services?)

    -- Mike --

    27.4.2003 23:54 #1

© 2024 AfterDawn Oy

Hosted by
Powered by UpCloud