p2pnet.net News:- And they’re OFF – the online music stores which, earnestly pray the Big Five record labels, will lead to serious online sales of their ‘product’ in Europe.

Roxio’s Napster II was first at the gate but isn’t a major contender and in the lead for the moment is OD2, more or less a partnerhsip between Peter Gabriel and Microsoft.

But Apple’s iTunes is coming up fast, having officially launched in the UK, France and Germany today with plans for an across-Europe presence.

Aided by heavy betting by mainstream music industry media supporters, Apple could indeed take the plastic Corporate Music Online Cup.

Whether or not it will mean much in the long terms is, though, another question.

"The iTunes Music Store in the UK, France and Germany all feature over 700,000 songs from all five major music companies," states a Macworld UK story here.

However, "while the volume of files (and interest) is concentrated on a few hundred thousand top titles (many of which are for sale online, and many of which – Beatles, Madonna, Led Zep, etc etc etc – are not) the available title library on a p2p absolutely dwarfs the paid offerings," Big Champagne’s Eric Garland told p2pnet.

"In fact, the variety of titles is limited only by the imaginations of every one of the tens of millions of P2P users."

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 15th, 2004 at 2:57 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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