Sony To Launch Satellite Music Service
By Rob Guth and Michael Drexler
TOKYO
The company that has built its fortunes on pioneering new ways to deliver music said Thursday it will start beaming songs via satellite to homes in Japan this May.
Beginning May 20, Sony's new MusicLink service will let customers with a remote control and television select songs on-screen and then download them onto a set-top receiver. The customers can download song lists and short profiles of musicians, and can save music on Sony's MiniDisc recorders, officials said.
The service will be run over SkyPerfecTV, an existing digital broadcasting business with investors including Sony and Australia's News Corp. SkyPerfecTV will dedicate one channel to the music service, officials said. Charges could range between 100 yen to 150 yen ($.85 to $1.28) per download, but the specific pricing has not been decided, according to Yoshiaki Nakanishi, a director at Digital Media Entertainment (DME), a joint venture set up to manage the service.
MusicLink will offer music from independent artists, or musicians that are not backed by a record label, Nakanishi said. DME will pay artists a percentage of the proceeds but the amount "will depend on the individual artist," according to Aldo Liguori, a Sony spokesman.
The service marks Sony's first commercial attempt to distribute music over a network. The growth of the Internet has spurred interest in online music among consumers, but has rankled leading record companies who fear the spread of pirated music online.
"Sony likely wants to continue being an innovator," said Hitoshi Kuriyama, senior analyst at Merrill Lynch Japan, noting that MusicLink is the world's first satellite-based music download service.
As a leading consumer-electronics company, Sony has a huge opportunity to create the building blocks for online music systems. Thursday, for instance, Sony announced a new MiniDisc recorder for MusicLink and a set-top box, called the PlusMedia Station, for accessing the service. The set-top box will sell for 62,000 yen.
But Sony, parent of one of the world's largest record labels, must also contend with the copyright risk of shipping digital music over networks, in addition to the potential hit on its revenues from music CDs.
The service will encrypt music tracks using a technology called Serial Copy Management System to foil would-be pirates. The system will use a Sony-developed compression technology called ATRAC (Adaptive Transform Acoustic Cording).
Officials were careful to say that MusicLink will coexist with existing music-distribution methods such as CDs. The 12-person DME, which Sony affiliates quietly set up last year, will manage the service. Sony affiliates supplied 90 percent of the 480 million yen startup capital for DME, with Japanese advertising giant Dentsu kicking in the rest.
At least one Sony competitor is planning direct-to-consumer satellite music service. Nippon Telegraph & Telephone and Victor Co. of Japan recently announced a project to use satellites to beam music to terminals in convenience stores, from which customers will be able to download tracks onto discs. And in the United States, IBM, supported by five leading record companies, will test a cable television-based system in San Diego, Calif., later this year.
Rob Guth and Michael Drexler write for the IDG News Service. |
