Online Music Milestone
Tuesday, 9 November 2004 00:20 am
For the first time ever I’ve purchased music online last weekend.
With the launch of the EU iTunes Music Store, one can purchase songs at 99 Euro cents each from a large database of music. The service is focused at EU, and there’s already an existing one in US. iTunes is not available yet in Asia Pacific, but if you have a credit card issued in one of the participating EU countries, you can sign up.
This is an interesting milestone in some respects:
- The music industry and record labels are finally starting to co-operate with online service providers to create an online distribution channel.
- Some of the large volume of songs that are downloaded free (mostly illegal) will start moving to the paid and legal form.
- While current users are early adopters, there will be a critical mass of users in a few years time. I expect next generations will get most of their music by downloading it electronically, rather than buying some kind of physical recording (like a CD).
- And consequence for retailers in this business: they better add a music download service to their portals to survive, or co-operate with the likes of Itunes.
See Apple’s Press Release here.
~m
