Marketfederation

We7 – Peter Gabriel’s ad-supported online music store – have received tremendous support from a very unlikely source. From April all of Sony BMG’s back catalogue will be available for free streaming from the free music downloads site.

Yes, that is the same Sony BMG that joined forces with other industry bigwigs to sue anyone and anything that supported or resembled free music downloads. Whether this move will prompt similar moves by the other industry players remains to be seen.

Music downloads are having a particularly interesting time of late: 24-7 Entertainment is preparing to launch unlimited mobile music downloads for a Nordic provider; mobile provider 02 has announced a partnership with music download giant Napster; Napster is also in talks with mobile giant Vodafone.

The extent of DRM protection on music downloads in the above cases appears to vary from case to case with We7 using no DRM protection at all, to 24-7 offering tracks for download onto Mp3 players and burning onto CDs but still with a small amount of DRM to ensure the users are continuing members of its service.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 7:26 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.