SONY.....
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Friday August 13 2:34 AM ET
Sony To Start Selling Music On Internet
By Miki Shimogori
TOKYO (Reuters) - Sony Corp's (NYSE:SNE - news) music unit announced plans Friday to start selling music via the Internet by the end of this year.
Sony Music Entertainment (Japan) Inc, owned 71 percent by Sony, will sell songs of contracted Japanese artists including big-name music producer Tetsuya Komuro on the Internet.
They will be the first such online sales by a Japanese music company, whose sales of packaged music compact discs have dwindled amid prolonged weakness in the nation's economy.
The Sony unit said it would sell music at a price competitive with conventional compact discs (CDs), but insisted the move did not denote a big shift in its business priorities.
``This does not mean we have shifted our focus to non-packaged products from packaged. We will start new things as an add-on to our conventional services,' said a Sony Music spokeswoman.
``We'll broaden our service lineup so users can make their own choice.'
In addition to domestic artists, Sony Music markets CDs of such international stars as Mariah Carey, Michael Jackson and Celine Dion, who have recording contracts with the company's U.S. sister firm Sony Music Entertainment Inc. But the online sales will be limited to domestic artists.
Sony's move comes just as the online music craze gathers pace in the United States, where small electronics firms are beating their larger rivals to the punch, launching new portable devices that let fans take computer music files on the road.
Among these is the Rio, a gadget of Diamond Multimedia Systems Inc (Nasdaq:DIMD - news) that plays music files using the MP3 format.
MP3, or Moving Pictures Expert Group Audio Layer 3, is a way of compressing digital music so it takes up far less space on a computer's hard disk and can be sent more quickly over the Internet. It has become the de facto standard for getting songs online and is spawning a new class of consumer gadgets that is hailed as the future of portable music.
Sony Music said it has not yet decided how songs will be distributed via the Internet or how it will charge for them.
The price of a song online could be around 200 to 500 yen ($1.75-$4.35), competitive with the price of a conventional single CD in Japan of 800 to 1,000 yen for two or three songs.
At around the same time, Sony plans to launch a new portable music player using its so-called ``memory stick' technology, which saves data such as music files on a special storage device that looks like a stick of gum.
``We hope to see some synergies between the launches of online music sales and of the memory stick Walkman,' said the spokeswoman. Online music can be downloaded to the ultra-compact memory device or other conventional media formats such as minidiscs or rewritable CDs, she said.
Sony said it plans to launch the stick Walkman by the end of this year, but has not decided the price or other details such as whether it will also be compatible with minidiscs or CDs.
In February, Sony began selling its Vaio series personal computers, photo printers and digital photo frames with Memory Stick slots.
The thumb-size Memory Stick, which can store hundreds of images, was developed last year by six Japanese companies -- Sony, Olympus Optical Co, Casio Computer, Sharp Corp, Fujitsu Ltd and Sanyo Electric Co.
($1-115 yen)
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