New Online Music Service For Australia

arb writes "Destra Music is the first online music retailer to open its doors in Australia. Currently their catalogue offers over 100,000 tracks priced from 99c (Australian) and they hope to have half a million tracks available by mid next year. Purchasers will be able to burn the songs to CD and copy them to portable devices. The tracks are available for purchase through online partners, such as JB Hi-Fi and Sanity Online. In what is believed to be a first for online music retailers, vouchers will be available in stores so you will not need a credit card to purchase online." Sounds like competition for Bigpond Music's download service, and also dealing with DRM'd .wma files.

Comments

Napster

[jcausey]

Napster has been doing the voucher thing for a while now. That being said, "a while now" means a few months :)

sample music

[shione]

Their site still needs some work. I'm downloading a sample song off jbhifi's site http://jbhifi.destramusic.com/player/ and on Mozilla Phoenix its coming down as a html file. I should be able to renamed it as a wma file when its done so it shouldn't be a problem but it still something they need to fix.

I wonder how restirctive the drm is on their wma files. AU99c is only ~US72cents so its cheaper than the US sites but as somebody already mentioned thats how much the prices starts from.

Re:sample music

[cscx]

The web server is probably returning an incorrect MIME type in the HTTP header; IE makes a guess at the file's contents regardless of what the header says, while Mozilla variants follow the header exactly.

Re:Oxymoron?

[blowdart]

Well there's limited by IP address (unreliable) or checking the address of the payment card.

A better question is why is music on-line limited to one area? The answer to that lies in the painful way rights are issued to record labels. For example, Capitol in the US own the rights to Beatles recordings, EMI own them in Europe. Setting aside that Capitol really is EMI, Capitol cannot grant the rights to sell "Let it Be" to a company based in Europe, only EMI Europe can.

It gets even more complicated when you start looking at the copyright on lyrics, which may belong to someone else altogether.

Re:Don't believe the advertising

[eclectro]

For those that are curious, at today's exchange rate; .99 Australian dollar = .74 USD

and

1.99 Australian = 1.48 USD

Re:Yes but what if we don't run Windows....

[hype7]

...or want files in .wma format?

then do what everyone else does when offered WMA files.

Just say no.

The first to take on Apple was BuyMusic.com in July. It expected 1 million daily song downloads. "We're not achieving that at all," says BuyMusic CEO Scott Blum. "I've spoken with my competitors, and we're nowhere near (Apple's) numbers."

-- james

Just paid for and downloaded a song...

[rixon]

For the record:
- it was easy to find the song
- easy to sign up
- easy to pay
- easy to download
- easy to play (after media player updated itself with the DRM stuff)
- easy to burn to audio CD

The web site's HTML needs work, though.

Overall I enjoyed the experience. It gave me the "hey that's cool" smile.

Oh and yes I know I'm supposed to hate it 'cos it's DRM WMA. Know what? If I can burn it to a red book CD then I'm happy.

Install pieces of Palladium

[SgtChaireBourne]

Yes, despite the "strong dollar" policy the bad shape of the economy meant using tricks like cutting the interest rate. However, the interest rate is already as low as it can go so that can't be cut further. There have already been several recessions recently, but just now deflation is the problem. The recent "growth" seems to result from the change in the value of the dollar, jobs are still getting cut, rather than an increase in trade. Maybe economic depression can be avoided maybe not. Hiding deflation by devaluing the dollar relative to other currencies is only cosmetic and irresponsible.

It's a shame that in the last three years the U.S. looks now in a position where two or three large countries could make it cry "Uncle"

Anyway, strong or weak US vs Australian dollar, the service is misleading. 99 cents my ass. It's just another gimmick to get kids to install pieces of Palladium/DRM on their parents machines.