so nice of Warner music

[ONEMANBANNED]

WARNER MUSIC GROUP announced separate deals Thursday with the online subscription services MusicNet and Pressplay that would allow consumers to buy, download and transfer songs from artists such as Linkin Park and Matchbox 20 to compact discs and portable devices like MP3 players.
With the Warner agreement, Pressplay, a joint venture of Sony and Universal Music, becomes the first service to allow consumers to buy and “burn” songs from all five major recording labels. “Burning” is the process of copying a downloaded track to a CD, which can then be played on any CD player.
Rival MusicNet, which is backed by BMG, EMI and Warner, now has two of the big five on board for permanently owned downloads. Licensing deals with the other three are expected soon.
The key word here is “permanent”. Previously, most online music services operated on a subscription model — you were able to download music, but drop the subscription and the files disappeared from your hard drive.
The freedom for consumers to permanently own the songs they access at the for-pay music services has been the glaring problem with legitimate online music markets since they launched late last year.
The industry’s recent push to allow people to transfer music off the computer desktop is a “sure step” to increasing the popularity of legitimate downloads, said Ryan Jones, analyst with the Yankee Group.
Advertisement





“We continue to pursue a strategy of making our music available to a variety of services and in a way that offers consumers high-quality music that can be enjoyed in multiple environments, not just on the PC,” said Will Tanous, a spokesman for Warner Music. “We’re confident that these agreements will stimulate and give rise to innovative services that offer will music fans not only breadth of content, but an overall music experience that will consumers will find attractive.”
Warner’s not the only music giant burning ahead on the Net music front.
EMI said Wednesday it would allow permanent downloads and limited burning of songs in its catalog for the first time. Included in the deal are “tens of thousands” of recordings that have not been previously available online legally, such as the work of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and the Beach Boys.
Effective Dec. 1, consumers will be able to burn a music track to a CD three times and would also be able to import a song to portable devices that feature copyright security features. In addition to MusicNet and Pressplay, EMI signed licensing deals with seven other leading online music distributors: Alliance Entertainment, Ecast, FullAudio, Liquid Audio, Listen.com’s Rhapsody, Roxio and Streamwaves.





In a separate deal, MusicMatch, an online service that charges users $5 a month for access to its streaming music jukebox, closed streaming deals with four of the five major record labels. The company expects to offer song downloads by the middle of next year, said Bob Olweiner, senior vice president.
While Pressplay’s “burning” deals with all five major labels may give it a temporary advantage, Internet music analysts predict that several of the online services will offer identical features within the next year.
At that point, “they’ll start competing on pricing and service,” said P.J. McNealy, analyst with GartnerG2.
The week’s rush of music licensing deals follow recent gloomy news about CD sales. Total unit music sales — online and offline — dropped 12.9 percent year-to-date, according to a report last week from Nielsen SoundScan, the music industry’s leading research firm.
A separate report from comScore Networks found that online CD sales plunged 25 percent to $545 million through September, even as traffic to file-swapping services exploded. Visitors to KaZaa, a file-swapping network, grew from 1 million a month in June 2001 to 10 million in September 2002, according to comScore.