well, for the sake of posterity (or should that be prosperity<G>) i'll add the latest news to the board.
just waiting for this thing to break out big time!
Sanyo to sell new digital portable audio player
TOKYO, March 1 (Reuters) - Sanyo Electric Co Ltd <6764.T> said it will start selling in April a portable device for playing music downloaded from personal computers or compact disc (CD) players.
Sanyo also said it will start selling digital music and Sanyo's audio products through a web site, Sound Boutique, on April 21. Sanyo has no estimate for sales through the web site, which will also provide software upgrade services and other customer support services, a spokesman said.
Sanyo, an Osaka-based major electronic appliance maker, aims to sell 20,000 copies of its new SSP-PD7 portable player in the first month after it goes on sale April 21 in Japan. It is priced at 37,000 yen.
The company is expected to start selling the gadget in the United States one month later, the spokesman said. The company has yet to set sales targets for overseas markets, he added.
The gadget employs the Secure Portable Player Platform (SP3) security system for copyright protection developed by Liquid Audio Inc <LQID.O>.
By 0437 GMT, Sanyo's shares were up 10 yen or 2.23 percent at 458 yen.
00:09 03-01-00
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Seagram to sell music online in the spring
By Sue Zeidler
LOS ANGELES, March 3 (Reuters) - Seagram Co. Ltd.'s <VO.TO> Universal Music Group will start selling music online this spring, Seagram chief executive Edgar Bronfman said on Friday.
"We need to stop thinking about selling round things. In the future, we'll be selling songs, albums, multi-song packages, compilations, services, subscriptions, streaming and on and on," Bronfman said in a speech at the Jupiter Consumer Online forum in New York.
Universal will make music widely available in digital form this spring, with the launch of a secure digital downloading format. Other content, like biographical information and cover art, will also be available, a spokeswoman said.
Record labels have, until recently, balked at releasing songs on the Internet amid fears of online piracy and alienating retail stores which sell their products.
But the race to move online has heated up since Time Warner Inc's deal in January to merge with Internet giant America Online Inc and fellow record company EMI Group Plc. <EMI.L>
Universal, which sells music from top artists like U2 and Sheryl Crow, and has more than 1 million songs in its catalog, in January announced it was collaborating with top Internet audio company RealNetworks Inc. <RNWK.O> to offer Net surfers a way to listen to music from the music giant.
Under the agreement, the RealJukebox player will now be able to play music encoded in a secure format developed by Universal. A Seagram spokesman said Universal's digital format would comply with the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI), in which the record industry has banded together with technology companies in trying to develop a piracy-safe standard for distributing music.
In January, Universal said it hoped to start offering music online within six months. Bronfman's statements on Friday indicated Universal was pushing to meet or exceed that target.
"I expected to see major labels starting to offer more downloads the second quarter of this year, with significannt amounts of content possibly showing up in the third quarter. If they're serious, Universal is aggressively pushing up that timetable," said Malcolm Maclachlan, analyst with IDC, a technology research firm.
Other industry experts agreed that labels are moving faster toward the World Wide Web.
"The record companies have definitely taken a different attitude in the last few weeks," said Gene Hoffman, president and chief executive officer of Emusic.com Inc., <EMUS.O> a seller of downloadable music, during a recent interview.
But Hoffman and analysts expect online offerings by Universal, the top music seller in 1999, to still be limited due to continued copyright issues. "It's like buying a car with a speed governor on it. There will be restrictions and the real question is how will the consumer take to it," Hoffman said.
Dan O'Brien, an analyst with Forrester Research said, "the fine print not usually announced is that only a small subset of the label's catalog is actually available online. They still think of the Internet more of as a promotional medium than a true distribution channel."
All the labels, including BMG Music, a unit of German media group Bertelsmann AG<BTGGga.D>, Sony Music <6758.T> Warner and EMI are heightening Internet efforts.
Last year, EMI hired Liquid Audio Inc. <LQID.O> to encode its catalog of music so CD-quality songs can be sent quickly over the Internet but cannot be copied without authorization.
It has also made its catalog available to Musicmaker.com, <HITS.O> which lets customers create custom CDs online.
Currently, most fans downloading music are using MP3 files, a compression format used to convert music on CDs into computer files. Record labels have strongly opposed MP3, because it enables distribution of music without any copyright protection of collection of royaltiles.
18:06 03-03-00
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