8 Major Audio Companies Form "Any Music, Inc" for

[Audioholics]

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<FONT face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size=2>Eight companies (Kenwood Corp., Sharp Corp., Sony Corp., Pioneer Corp., Onkyo Corp., D&amp;M Holdings Inc., Victor Company of Japan, Ltd. (JVC), and Yamaha Corp.) agreed on a joint investment to establish <STRONG>Any Music Inc.</STRONG> </FONT></P>

<FONT face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size=2>The new company will establish a broadband music service platform that will distribute music <EM>directly</EM> to compatible audio equipment. Any Music service is due to start on May 20, 2004. Any Music will partner with LabelGate Inc. a music distribution company formed by the joint investment of Japan's leading record labels for system integration and content provision. A music library of approximately 38,000 songs will be available for the Any Music service start and will be priced from ~$1.50 (¥158) per single to ~$10 (¥1050) per album.</FONT></P>

<FONT face=Arial size=2>While Any Music service has yet to be announced domestically, you can expect this to be a good test bed for a US release sometime next year. With all of the major players providing support, we wouldn't be surprised to see some hardware modifications designed to work with this new system in upcoming product releases.</FONT></P>

<FONT face=Arial size=2>Read the Release</FONT></P></font>

 

[House de Kris]

<font color='#000000'>Interesting, but without further information, I've got about as much interest in this as existing music services of today. &nbsp;Namely, they claim their effort is to "establish a broadband music service platform" but don't discuss the format itself. &nbsp;If this is MP3 or other compressed format, then I fail to see the need for this to be established as a broadband music service. &nbsp;If the intent is to take advantage of all your customers having a high speed broadband connection, then I would insist on uncompressed music. &nbsp;But, they make no mention (that I was able to find) of the quality of the file being purchased.

As of this moment, with my assumption it is a compressed file, this story doesn't elicit anything more exciting than a yawn.</font>

 

[Jens]

More info

Hi,
I just checked their japanese site.

The format, they are using is ATRAC3 (132 kbps).
They are streaming (!!) the content to the audio equipment.
The songs are NOT stored locally!!!!

Cheers,
Jens