Hot on the heels of the launch of Destra's online music store, www.destramusic.com, Telstra's page bigpondmusic.com will offer music tracks for AU$1.49 for BigPond customers and AU$1.89 for non-BigPond customers.
The service is unmetered for BigPond cable and ADSL customers, who are automatically registered for the service, can also opt to have the charges for the music tracks added to their telephone bills instead of the standard method of paying by credit card. Non-BigPond customers have to register at the site when they first visit.
Telstra had announced the music site last October, but had indicated the price would be at least AU$2 per track.
BigPond Music has arrangements with Warner, Sony, EMI and Festival Mushroom Records, and claims to be in discussions with other major labels and more than 60 independent Australian record labels.
"We have an extensive range of tracks available at launch," said Justin Milne, BigPond managing director. "We will be constantly adding more tracks to the site by drawing on our content deals which already give us access to more than 250,000 tracks."
Logged in to try at 3pm 04Feb03
Site slow - music slower - gave up after 15 minutes of nothing - typical?