The press release today by EMI seems to have been but a PR move. The thing is, the 20 sites mentioned have been open for a while already, and although EMI's music is available on them, there is nothing EMI-specific about these services.
The company that has been implementing the actual sites is (as someone already pointed out) OD2, or On Demand Distribution, founded by Peter Gabriel. OD2 has released music download services on about 20 European websites, including Tiscali's and MSN's. All of these services feature music from all of the major labels, and all of these services allow burning of songs & transfers to portable devices. (For a price of course.)
OD2 also organized a promotion effort for these services called Digital Download Day; check it out if you want to see the complete list of sites the service is available on.
Incidentally, OD2 uses WMA audio. If you check out the press release, you'll also see that it doesn't mention MP3. I sincerely doubt that EMI would go for an unprotected format, although some news organizations have interpreted it as such.
So you see, it's not just EMI that's doing all this. The only real news in the article is the amount of tracks available (200.000). The whole of the OD2 service includes ca. 150.000 tracks so far, so it could be that EMI has cleared a bunch of new songs for release.
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The press release today by EMI seems to have been but a PR move. The thing is, the 20 sites mentioned have been open for a while already, and although EMI's music is available on them, there is nothing EMI-specific about these services.
The company that has been implementing the actual sites is (as someone already pointed out) OD2, or On Demand Distribution, founded by Peter Gabriel. OD2 has released music download services on about 20 European websites, including Tiscali's and MSN's. All of these services feature music from all of the major labels, and all of these services allow burning of songs & transfers to portable devices. (For a price of course.)
OD2 also organized a promotion effort for these services called Digital Download Day; check it out if you want to see the complete list of sites the service is available on.
Incidentally, OD2 uses WMA audio. If you check out the press release, you'll also see that it doesn't mention MP3. I sincerely doubt that EMI would go for an unprotected format, although some news organizations have interpreted it as such.
So you see, it's not just EMI that's doing all this. The only real news in the article is the amount of tracks available (200.000). The whole of the OD2 service includes ca. 150.000 tracks so far, so it could be that EMI has cleared a bunch of new songs for release.