To sell content to consumers, you have to have a license from the content owner. I’ve already posted about how that works, here and here. However, since that is no small feat and not cheap and the infrastructure/bandwidth is expensive, etc etc, there is a clear market need for companies like MusicNet. MusicNet provides content delivery for on-line music retailers. They provide a turnkey solution (that you can brand with your own look and feel, but the functionality is theirs) that includes player and ecommerce functions. They are filling a bit of a market need. They offer delivery and a far less cost of entry than going straight to the labels. Not a bad deal and in general a good thing for a startup to leverage (now, if the majors change their tune and start simple aggregate licensing, well, I see less of a need for MusicNet, but maybe they will find an additional model). I’ve been talking to MusicNet for well over six months now about striking a deal. It’s hard to get a lot of people in the music industry on the phone (unless you are somebody) and that has been part of the reason it’s taken so long. Here is the other part of the reason: they don’t really know what to do with us. We’re asking for DRM-free content, we have a reasonable solution for controls that the labels are interested in, we want higher quality (320kbps MP3 versus 192kbps DRMWMA) and we want to integrate their api as opposed to using their turn-key approach. However, they have a license too, and it doesn’t really support what we want. So, what to do? I offered what we offered to EMI - give us some promotional content in MP3 format and we’ll go from there. Since they (and any other aggregator) stores backups of the original digital files in .wav (or .aiff) format, I offered to pay for converting it to the format we need - just provide us feed. We would do that for any aggregator who has that as an obstacle, we’re doing it with CDBaby. They are taking it back to their team to discuss. They are pretty sure they “wouldn’t do it for just “, but it might be on the strategic table for them since the industry is starting to face that direction.

Originally published on WordPress on February 01, 2007. Migrated to this blog on May 29, 2025.