EMI Bites The Binary Bullet

It seems that the big boys are finally oiling those corporate cogs into action as EMI Recorded Music has announced that it has hired Liquid Audio to start encoding its huge library of songs for delivery over the Internet.

Company officials called it the biggest step yet by a major record label toward selling digital music online, despite the fact that no sales are planned until the fourth quarter of 1999 and we would tend to agree.

EMI Music oversees labels such as Capitol, Virgin, and Blue Note and owns rights to songs by artists from hip-hop stars the Beastie Boys to country singer Garth Brooks [Yeeha, well be eagerly waiting for that one]. But they are also intertwined with Virgin Records and a shed load of other labels and enterprises that are too complicated for us to understand, surffice to say that EMI is hooooge.

"The Internet is this huge medium where the mute button's on. Now the mute button's going to be turned off," Jay Samit, senior vice president for EMI's New Media division, said in an interview with Reuters. "This is one of our steps on the road to the digital-distribution future."

Under the deal, Liquid Audio will use its proprietary format to encode thousands of EMI CDs a week so they can be downloaded for playback on PCs or portable digital devices such as the Rio. Samit said online sales would have to wait for the results of the Secure Digital Music Initiative, a joint effort by the music and technology industries to draft a secure standard for digital-music delivery.

The deal is a huge boost for Liquid Audio, which is preparing to go public as it goes head to head with other digital music players, including Microsoft, IBM, and AT&T. As part of the deal, EMI takes a small stake in Liquid Audio. Samit said the stake was "extremely low," but EMI wanted to "show our support" for its technology partner. I'll buy that for a dollar.

http://www.liquidaudio.com/

© ninfomania