Next month will see the latest development in online music sites when Festival Records launched its new e-tailing venture, Whammo, a site dedicated to selling and promoting Australian music online.
Festival, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Ltd, is one of the Australia's most established popular music labels. Over the past 18 months the company has been undergoing a major repositioning in the market and earlier this year, bought one of Australia's most successful independent labels, Mushroom Records.
While the site will be in competition with other music e-tailers such as Chaos Music, Festival's Online Manager, Julie Bennett said that its Australia focus will give it a unique market niche. Despite its affiliation with Festival, Bennett told ZDNet that it will stock music from all major Australian record labels, not just its parent company.
"The premise is that if we're going to be the world-wide home for Australian music, we're going to have to have stock from other companies," she noted.
In addition to selling CDs online, Whammo will also provide downloadable free MP3 files, streaming audio and pay-for-download, secure Liquid Audio files.
While there had been some resistance from retailers, Bennett noted, it was likely that the site wouldn't compete directly with stores, rather fill a gap in the market. Bennet said that with the new music environment, since the parallel importation laws were passed it is necessary for companies such as Festival to search out overseas markets.
"This is a response to parallel importation, if the world is going to be coming to us, we need to seek out a worldwide niche markets."
