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Pastimes : CD Burners Emporium -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Original Mad Dog who wrote (162)	4/9/2001 5:38:30 PM
From: Original Mad Dog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3937

dailynews.yahoo.com Thursday April 5 10:21 PM ET UPDATE 1-Universal said potential buyer of EMusic.com (Updates with detail throughout, previous REDWOOD CITY, Calif.) LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - EMusic.com Inc., which has struggled to launch a music subscription service on the Internet, said Thursday it had reached a preliminary deal to sell the company and its online library of independent music to a major media company. A source close to the deal said Universal Music Group, the world's largest music company and a unit of France's Vivendi Universal, was the prospective buyer. A Universal spokeswoman declined to comment. EMusic, which declined to name the suitor, said the proposed acquisition price was 57 cents per share, terms which would value the company at nearly $23 million. The announcement comes as the five major music labels push into online distribution to take advantage of the opening created by the industry's legal victory over Napster (news - web sites), the wildly popular song-swapping service which is operating under a court order to stop trade in copyrighted material. The Washington Post reported Thursday that Universal Music intended to make EMusic a distribution platform for its recently launched Duet service, a joint partnership between Universal and Japan's Sony Music Entertainment , the third-largest record label. Earlier on Thursday, the two music companies announced a non-exclusive deal that would make Yahoo Inc. the first platform platform for the streaming and downloadable music that Duet plans to make available. Catalog Of 13,000 Albums In its current form, EMusic has an online catalog of some 13,000 albums, most of them from independent record labels, including recordings by Elvis Costello, Creedence Clearwater Revival and the classical orchestra of Academy of St. Martin-In-The-Fields under the direction of Neville Marriner. The site charges 99 cents for songs in the MP3 format and $8.99 to download a full MP3 album. EMusic also had 10,000 subscribers for a monthly service offering unlimited downloads as of the end of March, up from 4,500 subscribers three months earlier. Analysts and industry observers said the announcement of a possible EMusic deal underscored the new speed with which the recording industry is moving to set up commercial distribution platforms over the Internet now that Napster is seen as fading as a threat. ``The major labels are finally getting on board and working on serious projects to digitally distribute music,'' said Gianluca Grechi, managing director of the U.S. division of Vitaminic, a European digital music distributor. ``It means they're finally embracing new media to make their content available on the Web by relying on independent solutions already on the market.'' Phil Benyola, a digital media research analyst at Raymond James & Associates said the EMusic deal would make sense for Universal, which faces pressure from a competing online music distribution bloc that groups the other three of the top five labels. Competition From Musicnet Earlier this week, those companies --AOL Time Warner Inc. Warner Music Group, Bertelsmann AG (news - web sites)'s BMG Entertainment and EMI Group PLC -- said they have licensed their catalogs to MusicNet, a new venture that will be powered by Internet software company RealNetworks Inc. ``Duet is in a position where they have to do a one-up,'' said Benyola, who added that EMusic now stands out as ``an easy acquisition of content by one of the majors.'' In fact, a second rival bidder for EMusic could still emerge, given the relatively low offer price, he said. Bertelsmann, by comparison, has staked a relatively large investment in Napster, a privately held company with fewer tangible assets, he said. On Thursday, EMusic shares which face potential delisting from the Nasdaq and have fallen by 95 percent over the past year, jumped to near 34 cents on the news of the possible takeover. In a statement, EMusic declined to name the potential acquiring company, saying that it was not certain that the deal would close after a short period of exclusive talks or that the final terms would match those of the preliminary letter of intent. (Additional reporting by Reshma Kapadia in New York.)