Petteri Pyyny
15 Oct 2002 4:39
Pressplay, a subscription-based online music service owned by French Vivendi Universal and Japanese Sony has signed a licensing deal with German BMG which allows Pressplay to offer BMG's music catalogue through its service.
This brings Pressplay on par with its rival MusicNet, which is owned by Bertelsmann (the owner of BMG), AOL TimeWarner, EMI and RealNetworks. Both services offer music from four major record labels out of five. Pressplay is currently negotiating with AOL TimeWarner's Warner Music to get all five record labels into its service. Meanwhile analysts say that MusicNet is very close to sign a deal with Vivendi-owned Universal Music Group and with Sony to fill its gap.
Both major record label-backed services are currently behind the independent Rhapsody, owned by Listen.com, which was also the first of these three services to open in December last year. Each service has different ways of delivering the music to consumers and different terms on what users can do with the music they download. But currently the trend has been towards more open service, where users can download and burn music to CD pretty freely, within their monthly restrictions. None of the services have released any public data about the numbers of customers they have attracted so far and how much music one user downloads during an average month.
Sources:
BBC
Yahoo!