The other shoe has finally dropped on the e-music scene. Last week, Universal Music Group announced that it would break from the Big Five record labels and do the digital music dance by Christmas. Despite choosing a third party, InterTrust Technologies, to provide copyright protection for its music downloads, Universal was adamant in its support of the recording industry's still-in-progress Secure Digital Music Initiative. While the weeklies were busy digesting that bit of news, Sony announced this week that it would also start selling electronic downloads starting this summer. This time, however, the chosen technology was Microsoft's Windows Media 4.0 suite.
Music zine Webnoize frames this week's news as a partnership between Sony and Microsoft, saying the two had formed a "multipurpose relationship" that "calls for digital music sales, marketing, promotion and streaming-media event hosting." Besides selling singles, Sony will use Windows Media for streaming audio and video clips. Despite the plan, Sony exec Fred Ehrlich says online merchants will not be cut out of the picture, saying details of its relationships with other sites would be announced in the near future. Webnoize also says the deal vindicated Microsoft's strategy, as so far the major labels have been turning up their noses at the company's proprietary format. Sony doesn't seem fazed by Microsoft's legendary product delays: The new Windows Media Player won't be commercially available until the summer.
Meanwhile, the weeklies were busy swallowing last week's deal between Universal and InterTrust. The Economist's nice roundup organizes the chaos of recent events, competing technologies and brewing standards. The story's warning: Although they control most of the world's music, Universal et al. should not get too smug. MP3 - good or bad, format of the future or not - has sparked a number of pacesetters, and any of them could become the Amazon.com of digital music distribution. "[The labels'] unpopularity and lack of brand recognition will work against their ambition to become the filter that consumers turn to," says the Economist, citing MP3.com, GoodNoise.com and Atomic Pop as candidates for the online throne. The battle's impact will not be limited to the music biz, the Economist says; newspapers, magazines, photographers and even movie studios will take their cue from the outcome as they try to protect copyrights in the electronic world.
Internet World focuses its lens on InterTrust, which now boasts a stable of clients that includes Universal, Diamond Multimedia (maker of the Rio MP3 player) and Reciprocal (developer of "media solutions," according to the story). InterTrust senior veep Joe Jennings explains why the 9-year-old company is suddenly getting so much attention. "Enterprise software is a snooze. But if [Public Enemy rap artist] Chuck D gets on TV and says 'I'm going to ride MP3,' and I think he said 'like a motherfucker,' my phone rings off the hook." IW reporter Whit Andrews doesn't explain the company's product much beyond being a technology designed "to protect digitized intellectual property," but people are clamoring for it nonetheless.
