Imeem Buys Social Music Service Anywhere.FM
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The social networking service has made its first acquisition, a small one in online social music service Anywhere.FM.
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Social network will allow individual creators to put a price on their content.
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(InfoWorld) - Omnifone wants to put a new face on mobile phone music downloads with its MusicStation service. Built around a software client that runs on a wide range of phones, MusicStation links to a subscription-based online music store and allows users to build and share playlists, follow news about their favorite bands, and play and download music on their mobile for a fixed weekly fee, said CEO Rob Lewis. The MusicStation application lets subscribers download music over the air using GPRSÂ or 3G mobile networks. The software runs on phones with Symbian's OS or other phones that can run Java applets. Omnifone, based in London, hopes to challenge Apple's forthcoming iPhone, offering users a similarly easy-to-use music service from around three-quarters of phones currently sold, but giving network operators a slice of the revenue, Lewis said. The MusicStation platform charges music directly to the customer's phone bill and doesn't require customers to use a credit card. The company has reached agreements with 23 mobile network operators to use its music download platform to sell music from major record labels, including Universal Music Group. It has also partnered with Musiwave, a mobile music services provider that's part of Openwave Systems, to distribute the MusicStation system. Scandinavian operator Telenor and South African network VodacomÂ are scheduled to launch MusicStation first, by June. Omnifone will name four more customers in Western Europe and the Asia-Pacific region by June, it said at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona on Monday. Omnifone said consumers don't need a computer or broadband Internet connection to use MusicStation, although downloaded music can also be transferred to a user's computer with a premium subscription. MusicStation is priced as a weekly subscription; in the U.K., the price will be Â£1.99 per week ($3.87) or â¬2.99 ($5.82) throughout Europe. The premium service will be Â£2.99 in the U.K. and â¬3.99 throughout Europe. The platform supports DRM (digital rights management) technology, which limits how the music can be used, and tracks will be sold in the eAAC+ (enhanced advanced audio coding), Omnifone said. On 3G networks, they are encoded at 48Kbps, and on GPRS networks at 32Kbps to shorten download times. On phones with limited memory capacity, MusicStation monitors which tracks are played most often and deletes little-used tracks to free up space. They can, however, be downloaded again later as long as the user remains a subscriber, Lewis said. Peter Sayer in Paris, contributed to this report. Â
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BRITAIN'S biggest social networking website has reached an agreement with Apple to offer its users access to the iTunes catalogue of five million songs.
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$160m cash purchase to propel digital music market entry
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Later this year, portable music subscription services will offer to fill your MP3 player with tunes for a monthly fee. Here's a preview of one of the first.
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Yahoo! has announced that it will acquire digital music company Musicmatch for $160 million in cash. With the addition of Musicmatch's Jukebox service to its portfolio, the move will help Yahoo! establish itself in the online music market currently dominated by Apple's iTunes.
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(InfoWorld) - MySpace.com is launching a new music download service that emphasizes music from independent artists, the latest in a string of services announced in recent weeks that hope to topple iTunes from its crown. Some of the services, such as one backed by Universal Music Group, are even offering music for free, backed by advertising services. But analysts say they'll have trouble toppling Apple Computer's iTunes, which has staked out a solid position in what's becoming a crowded music download market. "Ultimately it's a volume business, and the market isn't large enough to sustain 20 different services," said Jonathan Arber, research analyst for OvumÂ in London. The service from MySpace.com, which is in beta today, lets users sell their own songs through their personalized MySpace home pages. The company has partnered with Snocap, a companyÂ founded by NapsterÂ founder Shawn Fanning, for some of the technology behind the service. MySpace's large user base, which it says is more than 70 million, may be key for the new offering, as it jostles with several other technology and media companies that have allied to secure a piece of the music download market. Last week, Samsung ElectronicsÂ said it would start a subscription service later this year withÂ partner MusicNet. The online store will have 2 million licensed songs from major record labels and 40,000 independent ones. Also last week, a new company,Â SpiralFrog, said it will offer free music downloadsÂ backed by Universal Music Group's catalog, with the service supported by advertising. It's due to launch in beta by the end of this year. While MySpace's service hasn't been formally announced, a marketing executive at the company began touting it on her MySpace Web page on Monday, offering tracks from a group called The Format for $0.79 each. (http://www.myspace.com/danidudeck) The service will let users embed songs in their personalized pages that other users can then purchase, wrote Dani Dudeck, MySpace director of communications. To buy songs, a user needs an account from eBay's PayPal money transfer service and a U.S. billing address. Artists will be able to set the price of their tracks, with MySpace and Snocap keeping a small service fee, according to a story Monday in Business Week magazine. The service could appeal to aspiring musicians, allowing them to skirt business arrangements with music labels and pitch their songs directly to MySpace's users. It's unclear, however, whether the major labels will embrace it. They may be wary of posting tracks on MySpace because the songs will be in an MP3 format without Digital Rights Management (DRM), which restricts how they can be copied and played, Arber said. The means the tracks could potentially be downloaded from MySpace and then uploaded to illegal file-sharing networks. At the same time, he said, the opportunity to set variable pricing for songs offered on MySpace could be more attractive for the major record labels, who have bristled over Apple's insistence on uniform pricing. Individual tracks in the U.S. retail for $0.99 each. Apple has so far retained its lead in music downloads. iPod users can purchase compatible songs from the iTunes Music Store and eMusic.com, but most other services offer songs in incompatible file formats. It's led other companies to try other approaches, such as subscription and ad-supported services, both those each present their own difficulties. Napster and Yahoo have subscription services where users have access to thousands of tracks as long as they continue to pay monthly fees. But the subscription model generally hasn't been that successful, Arber said. Ad-supported services, such as Universal's arrangement announced last week with SpiralFrog, could face competition from more experienced Internet companies. "There are already existing companies that are much better at targeting advertisers on the Web," Arber said.
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Following todayâs launch of Robbie Williams Greatest Hits album, digital music lovers or more importantly in this case mobile phone users will be able to buy the new album from Carphone Warehouse following a deal with EMI.
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Yahoo buys the online jukebox provider MusicMatch to tap into the appetite for song downloads.
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Yahoo said Tuesday that it is acquiring digital music specialist Musicmatch for $160 million in cash. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company said the buyout would help it expand its presence in the simmering
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MySpace, a website considered the hip place to socialize online, announced it will enable members to sell their music.
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AT&amp;T Wireless is wading into the digital music market with a new service that enables its mobile phone users to browse and purchase song downloads over the phone and then retrieve them online on a computer.
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By Nic Fildes  Last.FM, the London-based music-recommendation internet site, has been snapped up by the US media giant CBS for [pound]140m in cash, the largest-ever acquisition of a UK social networking company.
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Yahoo! yesterday became the latest big name to make its presence felt in the burgeoning market for online music. The internet portal agreed a $160m (Â£89m) deal to acquire Musicmatch, a San Diego-based firm
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Blog: Financial Times reports that the iTunes Store has inked its first deal with a third-party social network.
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na move to expand its role in the online music business, Yahoo announced yesterday that it would buy Musicmatch, a company that sells music online, for $160 million.