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Out-Law News 1 min. read

Microsoft beats Apple into Europe's pay-per-song market


Emulating Apple's popular pay-as-you-go plan for licensed music downloads, Microsoft has become the first to launch a similar service for the European market, with prices of €0.99 or £0.75 per track, without the need for a subscription.

Apple's iTunes service has sold more than 6.5 million tracks in its first three months. Its success is attributed largely to dispensing with the need for a monthly subscription: it offers tracks for 99 cents each, with freedom to burn them to CD. But Apple does not yet offer its service to European music fans due to licensing issues.

Microsoft has now struck a deal with OD2, a service co-founded by Peter Gabriel. It is accessed by users through the Premium Services tab of the Windows Media Player 9 Series – and will benefit from a user base of 50 million, dwarfing Apple's anticipated competition.

OD2, or On Demand Distribution, has deals with all five major labels and leading independents. Its digital music catalogue offers more than 200,000 tracks by 8,500 artists, which yesterday became available for download without subscription.

Individual songs start at £0.75 (€0.99) per track, or £7.99 (€12.49) per album from artists including Eminem, Christina Aguilera, Kylie, Ms. Dynamite and David Gray. Those preferring to use a subscription-based service will get cheaper tracks - from £0.62 (€0.82).

Payment is in a system of credits. The minimum purchase is 500 credits, for £1.49, paid for by credit or debit card. For one credit, users can listen to a 30 second streaming clip that is not downloaded to the user's computer. For around 10 credits, users can download a track that cannot be burned to CD or copied to any portable device, which will lay for one year from the date of buying the credits. A permanent download costs 100 credits, which enables burning the track to CD or transfer to a portable player

An added attraction is the growing range of new releases that are being made available on-line the same day they are released to radio broadcasters, which is often a full six weeks before they are available on CD in conventional stores.

It seems the record companies are taking a more relaxed approach to licensing in an effort to battle unauthorised services like KaZaA, albeit the conditions with the service state:

"You must not make copies of the tracks to give, sell, loan, broadcast, send or transmit to friends and family (nor anyone else for that matter). The restrictions on copying that apply to cassettes and CDs, etc. also apply to the tracks accessed as part of these services. Copying at home is still illegal."

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