Due for launch "early in the new year", the site will offer songs from BMG, EMI, Festival Mushroom, Sony, Universal and Warner Music, as well as music from independent labels. The new store will be powered by OD2, a European online music distributor. In all 250,000 tracks will be available online.
OD2 chief executive Charles Grimsdale said the high number of tracks available for download will be the key to the new online store's success. "We know from monitoring sales figures in both Europe and North America that take-up is directly related to the number of commercial tracks available," he said.
NineMSN will continue to offer free music clips, interviews, previews and online chat sessions with celebrities, a statement from the company said.
Recording labels have a long track record of resisting online distribution, particularly through peer to peer (p2p) services. The U.S. based Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) successfully sued and shut down file-swapping service Napster, and is playing an active role in attempting to have other such services, such as Kazaa, outlawed -- this despite Kazaa's management and legal teams insisting their service is a legal and commercially viable distribution channel for DRM protected content.
While the announcement of NineMSN's new store may appear to be a departure from the recording industry's usual anti-online tactics, a spokesperson from the company was evasive when questioned on the theme. The spokesperson said the recording industry had been supportive and recognises that "there's a lot of opportunity in the online space". However, she declined to acknowledge a shift in attitude from the major labels.
The RIAA has long argued that Internet piracy through the Internet has eroded sales. However, the chief executive of local online music distributor, Domenic Carosa, says the piracy phenomenon is a result of a lack of consumer choice.
"Piracy is hurting sales at this particular point in time [because] there is no other option. If you want music in a digital format what options do you currently have? Piracy," he said during an interview in May.
Today Carosa said the launch is a positive sign for competition in the online music industry. "I think ultimately this is good for the consumer," he said.
The NineMSN announcement follows the introduction of Apple's iTunes service in the U.S. earlier this year. The company's service offers music for download at 99 cents per track.
While the songs are copy protected by Digital Rights Management (DRM) software, the hacker responsible for breaking the DVD code, Jon Johansen a.k.a. DVD Jon, has cracked the DRM process used by the iTunes service, allowing the purchasers of protected music to copy and share the tracks.
