With all the major record companies making announcements to develop online music subscription services, we figure it's worth a quick overview of what's happened in the past days.

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Yahoo for the music. Yahoo and Duet, the online digital music subscription service created by Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment, announced an alliance to present and market Duet's U.S. service to visitors to the Yahoo! network and Yahoo!(r) Music. The Duet subscription service is expected to launch this summer.

The University challenge
Universal Music Group and EMusic.com Inc. have signed a definitive merger agreement. Under this agreement, Universal Music Group will commence a cash tender offer to acquire all of EMusic's outstanding shares at a price of $0.57 per share. Any shares not purchased in the tender offer will be converted into the same cash price in a subsequent merger. In addition to having the Internet's leading downloadable music subscription service, EMusic operates one of the most popular families of music-oriented Web sites -- including RollingStone.com, EMusic.com and DownBeat.com.

Big Mighty Giant at work
BMG has announced its intention to group its music retail activities into a new unit called BeMusic. This combines online music retailer CDNow, which Bertelsmann acquired last year, with its BMG Music Service music club to create a division with about $1 billion in revenues and over 15 million customers.

Microsoft grabs its piece of the pie
The beta version of MSN Music has just been launched. As part of the MSN strategy to offer its 230 million unique users industry-leading services, MSN Music delivers a free,* easy way for music consumers to search for, listen to and discover music they like, whether their tastes include pop, rock, hip-hop or any of the more than 100 other styles offered on the service. A push for web wide domination
RealNetworks have formed a joint venture with AOL Time Warner, Bertelsmann and EMI Group to an online music subscription service. MusicNet will offer subscribers a wide collection of downloadable and streaming music. Issues such as pricing, copyright protection and the depth of content are yet to be publicly discussed.

 

Feedback:

• The corp's(e) never had a chance - randY 19:49:42 5/31/02 (1)
  • Re: The corp's(e) never had a chance - ed 21:14:49 9/01/02 (0)
• THIS SUX! BIG BUSINESS IS TAKING OVER - Leo 05:21:09 4/13/01 (0)