James Delahunty
7 Feb 2005 9:25
Apple has teamed up with Universal to offer rare Chinese music tracks on the iTunes music download service. Now that a lot of worlds biggest online download services have gotten the most popular content from the major record labels, the rush now seems to be offering music downloads of less popular and more rare music. For example a new download service called CrimsonBay launched recently to offer only Indian music tracks for download.
Apple's move could potentially be seen as a sign of the future for digital music retail, as online operators and music firms explore back catalogue and off-territory opportunities in the warehouse-cost-free new music market. P2P services have one major advantage over legal stores, and that's that you can find very rare music on P2P networks. A few years down the line it will be interesting to see the size of the catalogues the music download stores will have as the recording industry tries to get as much money out of the services as it can.
This new service is especially good for Chinese people in countries where it is hard to find Chinese music. They would havbe to go to music stores that specialise in foreign music to get it. Now that the music is availible via a legal music download service, the recording industries argument would be that there's no excuse now for using P2P networks to download and share it.
Source:
Macworld UK