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“By offering consistent and fair ownership rights, breakthrough music personalization, convenient purchasing and the highest quality files, our service is better than any free illegal alternative. The Musicmatch Downloads service is the best way for people to find, buy and enjoy music that matches their unique tastes. And each download is now subpoena-free.”
——Dennis Mudd
Monday, September 29, 2003

MUSICMATCH TRIES TO MATCH APPLE—WITH MUSIC

99¢ Download Store Opens Today, In as Much as It's an Online Store, So It Doesn't Really Open
Hey, here’s an idea: Get licenses from all of the Big Five and 30 or so indies, and sell songs as downloads for 99 cents without requiring a subscription.

That’s the plan behind Apple’s iTunes, er Musicmatch’s Downloads service, which begins operation today. Like iTunes, the Musicmatch service requires customers to download a specific player/shopping interface, Unlike iTunes, Musicmatch runs on Windows, something that more than 90% of computer users have, as opposed to Apple's roughly 3% marketshare. In addition, Musicmatch software is already on approximately 40 million computers.

The service launches with 200,000 songs, with half a million total projected to be online by the end of the year.

Musicmatch’s Downloads isn’t the first to offer songs to Windows customers; the first post-iTunes a la carte outlet for PC fans was BuyMusic.com. But Musicmatch does allow users to copy tracks to three computers, transfer to portable music players that handle Microsoft's secure music format and burn as many as five CDs with the same playlist.

Said Musicmatch Chairman/CEO Dennis Mudd: “By offering consistent and fair ownership rights, breakthrough music personalization, convenient purchasing and the highest quality files, our service is better than any free illegal alternative. The Musicmatch Downloads service is the best way for people to find, buy and enjoy music that matches their unique tastes. And each download is now subpoena-free.”

The MusicMatch software to get the songs is available from the company’s site, or you can download it for free from Kazaa.


 
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