James Delahunty
23 Feb 2005 9:51
Yahoo Japan Corp. and Sony Corp. affiliate Label Gate Co. Ltd. to launch a Japanese music download service the company has said. The service will be based on the current Mora download service. It will offer about 73,000 songs from 39 domestic record companies. The files will be encoded in Sony's ATRAC3 data compression format, and will be compatible with some portable music players along with some mobile phone devices and also the new Playstation Portable.
The songs will cost between ¥158 and ¥368 (US$1.50 and $3.50), said Nozomi Yamaguchi, a spokeswoman for Label Gate in Tokyo. Yahoo Japan attracts around 39 million visitors a month and is ranked as the countries No.1 visited website. Label Gate began operations in 2000 with support from a handful of record companies and has steadily attracted the support of additional companies. It relaunched its own Web-based download service under the Mora name in April 2004 and in October launched a second service, called Music Drop that provides music in the Windows Media format.
It will be interesting to see how the store gets on with online music sales, as more and more competition keeps arising in the market. Apple's iTunes music service is currently the world’s most popular digital music store having sold over 200 million downloads.
Source:
The Standard