MP3.com Reports Strong Subscription Service Demand
MP3.com, Inc., is reporting surprising demand for what MP3.com says is the Internet’s first on-demand music subscription system.
Launched just after MP3.com Inc. was found liable in US States District Court for copyright infringement in an action brought by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the MP3 subscription service offers unlimited downloading of classical music from the MP3.com Classical Music Channel.
The RIAA, which includes some of the world’s largest record labels, had claimed that the personalized MP3.com service known as My.MP3.com, allowed users access unlicensed copies of MP3-formatted music CDs, in violation of the rights of the music’s copyright owners.
In order to avoid any similar claims that MP3.com was promoting copyright infringement, MP3.com licenses and pays royalties on all of the content that is downloaded and played by subscribers to the Classical Music Channel.
“We expected healthy traffic domestically, but what really surprised us was the international demand,” said Chris Montgomery, MP3.com’s vice president of channel development and head of MP3.com’s Subscription Division. Montgomery told Newsbytes that while he could not give a specific reason for the popularity of the Classical Music Channel abroad, the subscription model was “being embraced all over.”
“Subscription channels are a way for music, video, and spoken word producers to potentially transform idle back catalogs into highly profitable, recurring revenue streams,” Montgomery said.
According to MP3.com, subscribers to the new subscription channel reside in Europe, Latin America and Asia, as well as in North America.
Subscribers to the Classical Music Channel pay a monthly fee of $9.99, which MP3.com says gives them unlimited streaming access to thousands of tracks that are fully downloadable from the MP3.com collection. In addition, MP3.com says that new releases will be featured every month, and subscribers can purchase classical music CDs at a 50 percent discount.
Montgomery would not say how many subscribers there are to the new channel. He said that MP3.com would be making an announcement in
approximately one week, at which time the service will have been in operation for about a month.
According to the company, the MP3.com subscription service offers flexible content management and administration tools whereby content providers can access daily auditing and usage statistics such as subscriber reports, artist’s page views, and the number of song plays
for precise royalty reconciliation.
In addition to monitoring tools, MP3.com’s Classical Music Channel offers a feature called “just-in-time” CD manufacturing, which allows content providers to create and sell their CDs online.
MP3.com says that its Classical Music Channel is the first of many proposed on-demand subscription channels that it will be launching. Other channels slated for release include alternative music, jazz, children’s content, and “urban.” Montgomery declined to say which offering would be next, only that an announcement would be made
soon.
More information is available from MP3.com, Inc. at
http://www.mp3.com .
Reported by Newsbytes.com, http://www.newsbytes.com