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January 27, 2010

Europeans to get Unlimited Digital Music With Subscription
By David Sims
TMCnet Contributing Editor

Omnifone (News - Alert) and HP have announced a partnership to offer digital music to PCs in ten European countries - Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.



"Preloaded on HP's Pavilion, Presario and Envy PCs, MusicStation will provide access to approximately 6.5 million tracks from Universal Music Group (News - Alert), Sony Music Entertainment, EMI Music and Warner Music International as well as independent labels" for about fifteen bucks a month, according to industry journal TechDigest.

MusicStation subscribers can also download and keep their favourite 10 tracks forever in DRM free MP3 file format each month as part of the deal.

"Specifically, the content deal will result in the launch of MusicStation Desktop on HP Pavilion, Compaq Presario and Envy personal computers, and will provide users with access to 6.5 million tracks," says industry observer Stevie Smith.

The deal is that the pre-loaded service has a free 14-day trial period, and if you like it you can pay the monthly fee for complete unlimited access to download, play and even swap all available content with others. The only catch is that downloaded tracks can only be listened to for as long as you keep subscribing to the MusicStation service, but you do get to keep the ten tracks a month forever.

It's not exactly Apple's (News - Alert) iTunes, but it's not hard to see that it's trying to eat Apple's lunch.

"With sales of CDs declining and music piracy at an all- time high, music streaming services or online jukeboxes are seen by record companies as one way to reverse years of falling revenue. Music services such as Spotify, Rhapsody and MusicStation offer millions of tracks and aim to get users to sign up to monthly payment plans," notes BusinessWeek.

David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.

Edited by Stefania Viscusi

 

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