Matthew Levinson

Buy your music online

Published on 27/08/05
by matt

It’s been a hectic month for music on the Internet. The guys from Big Champagne have been drumming up plenty of coverage in the magazines you find in airports across the world for their analysis of music download data, this week Chris Dahlen at Pitchfork captures its power in his excellent piece.

A friend in Australia told me about deal between Sony/BMG and a UK ISP linked to music website Playlouder to build walled P2P-friendly music sharing service bundled with a broadband deal. The radical deal is set to allow subscribers to share any Sony/BMG releases with anyone else on the network (because it’s a closed network they can monitor exactly how much and share the proceeds.

Last, it seems like the Australian indie distributors got together and decided to jump the online bandwagon. First up, Inertia launched a new website, including long rumoured digital distribution service along similar lines to Warp’s Bleep site. It’s very retail-oriented, which should be a kick in the teeth for the increasingly generic record shops in Australia. You can search their entire catalogue, buy directly from the site and buy digital downloads will shake things up. It’ll be interesting to see how they get around conflicts – being a label, distributor, retailer? Creative Vibes have jumped in too, though their site isn’t super friendly.

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