Listen.com strikes deal with Vivendi
Published: 02 Jul 2002 07:57 BST
Listen.com has signed a licensing agreement on Monday to offer songs from Vivendi Universal's Universal Music Group through its Rhapsody online music service.
Separately, online music company FullAudio struck an agreement to allow its customers to purchase digital songs from AOL Time Warner's Warner Music Group. Once the songs are purchased, listeners can burn the songs onto CDs or download them onto MP3 players. The Warner Music Group has been selling individual tracks for 99 cents on America Online.
Both agreements underscore the slow efforts among online music start-ups to strike licensing deals with the recording industry. For years, online music start-ups have encountered many hurdles in trying to license digital song catalogues from the major labels. But recently both sides have increasingly found middle ground in striking deals to offer copyrighted music via the Web.
The drive to create paid music services also highlights continued efforts among the industry to combat the ongoing proliferation of free file-swapping services such as the now-defunct Napster, Kazaa and Morpheus.
With the Listen deal, Rhapsody becomes the first online music company to offer song catalogues from all of the Big Five labels: Vivendi, Warner Music Group, Bertelsmann's BMG, Sony Music Entertainment and EMI Recorded Music. The labels themselves have launched their own attempts to sell digital music in the form of Pressplay and MusicNet, both of which offer downloads and streamed songs.
Unlike other subscription and file-swapping services, Rhapsody streams songs onto subscribers' computers, instead of offering downloadable song files. Some subscription plans also allow for songs to be burned onto CDs.
In all, Rhapsody, which costs $9.95 a month, will offer 175,000 tracks from the Big Five and other independent labels, including Zomba Recording, TVT Records, Bar/None Records and Sub Pop Records.
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