Pressplay in Licensing Deal With BMG
Pressplay, an online music venture jointly owned by the music divisions of Sony Corp. and Vivendi Universal, said it has licensed songs from a fourth major record company: BMG, one of the three labels that co-own rival online venture MusicNet. Terms were not disclosed.
The deal leaves Pressplay without music from only one major record company, AOL Time Warner subsidiary Warner Music Group.
Industry-authorized services such as Pressplay and MusicNet have struggled to compete with free file-sharing networks such as Kazaa and Morpheus, on which users can make unauthorized copies of songs for free.
The only subscription service offering music from all five major labels is Rhapsody from Listen.com, but unlike Pressplay, Rhapsody doesn’t let users download songs or record them onto CDs.
Pressplay executives hope to close that gap by the end of the year, when they expect to have deals with all five major labels.
Jon Healey
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