Petteri Pyyny
5 Sep 2002 15:23
Listen.com has signed yet another deal with a broadband ISP to sell its Rhapsody online music service through the broadband provider directly to ISP's customers. Latest deal is with St. Louis -based Charter Communications -- previously Listen.com has signed similiar deals with DirecTV and AOL TimeWarner's RoadRunner service.
ISP customers wont get any extra benefits compared to regular users, but Listen.com sees these deals significant, since broadband users are most likely to join to multimedia services, such as Rhapsody. People who sign up, will pay $9.95 a month and they have then full access to stream music from Rhapsody's music library of over 200,000 titles. Also limited number of tracks can be downloaded to customer's computer and even more limited number burned to CDR.
As limiting Listen.com's service is, it still brings healthy competition into marketplace, where other big players (MusicNet and Pressplay) are both owned by major record labels.