More and more music services are opening up all over the world to cater to legal downloads. This could be partly due to the (major!) efforts of the recording industry to curb illegal downloading but it could also be due to more people seeing the benefits of legal downloading. Of course, we cannot discount the possibility of companies trying to gain some benefit (monetary and otherwise) from opening legal paid download services.
In any case, there is another service that’s opening in Europe. Bigwig Hewlett-Packard is joining the fray and is opening up a music service in some European countries. Dubbed the MusicStation, this will be preloaded on some of HP’s personal computers. They will be released in the following countries:
• Austria
• Belgium
• Britain
• Italy
• France
• Germany
• The Netherlands
• Spain
• Sweden
• Switzerland
More from Reuters:
The service has been developed and is managed by British digital music firm Omnifone. HP runs a similar service in United States with RealNetworks’ Rhapsody.
Such new subscription services helped to lift sales of digital music 12 percent last year to $4.2 billion, industry trade body IFPI said last week.
“As the world’s biggest PC vendor, HP has huge opportunity to create a viable competitor to iTunes due to its scale,” said Rob Lewis, chief executive of Omnifone. Apple’s iTunes — with a pay-per-download business model — is the leading digital music distributor.
How much is this going to cost? 10 euros for a month for unlimited access. Not too bad.