Music industry watch

New Online Music Venture

C-NET and NYT are covering the announcement of a new online music venture formed by Best Buy, Tower Records, the Virgin Entertainment, Wherehouse Entertainment, Hastings Entertainment and Trans World Entertainment. Motivated by flagging Audio CD sales, the group wants to launch into online music sales.

Echo, the name of the new venture, is backed by some interesting parties. On one hand I have some anti-competitive uneasieness seeing so many competitors banding together, but on the other hand, this seems like the right group of companies to attempt this. Unlike the recording industry, they do not own the content and thus are more likely to offer it to the public in a more rational form than what PressPlay and MusicNet offer.

The Echo website states:

Echo will seek to unify the industry through a standard and open platform for the delivery of digital entertainment.

Echo provides a set of web services designed to support an array of advanced and richly featured music services integrating on-demand streaming and downloading with Echo's award-winning music recommendation services. Unique among music service platforms, Echo's asynchronous messaging backbone allows for a broad range of real-time community features tightly integrated with the listening experience. All of this is available in conjunction with what Echo intends to be the broadest digital music library available.

Standard and open is a good start, but does that mean I'll be able to download Ogg/Vorbis tracks from Echo? I suppose I'll settle for unDRMed MP3s. What is even more interesting from the site is that they plan to offer real-time community features tightly integrated with the listening experience. This sure sounds like the value-add (as compared to file sharing networks) that I've been talking about here.

This could be real promising, or it could turn out to be a complete dud. Only time will tell.

Posted by Mayhem at January 27, 2003 10:10 AM