Record company EMI Group plans to provide content for German media giant Bertelsmann's new Internet platform for downloading and sharing music, movies and games, it said on Friday.
EMI signed the first pan-European deal with arvato mobile, a unit of Bertelsmann's services and technology arm arvato, to offer end customers access to 300,000 music tracks from artists including Coldplay [pictured] and Norah Jones.
The software platform, called GNAB, allows makers and distributors of music, games, movies and ringtones to offer legal downloads of large files to clients under their own brands."GNAB is an innovative milestone on the way to a new digital download era," Bernhard Ribbrock, chief executive of arvato mobile, said in a joint statement with EMI.
"Fully authorised P2P (peer-to-peer) will enable consumers to access more music, allow retailers to offer interesting music products, provide new revenue streams for EMI Music and strengthen arvato mobile's position," he added.
Sharing legally copied and bootlegged music and movie files is hugely popular among Internet users and has turned services such as eDonkey and KaZaA into big hubs for music downloads while the music industry has stood on the sidelines.
But easy-to-use services such as computer maker Apple's iTunes have let the music industry discover its sympathy for music downloads and led to a surge in legal online music sales.
A spokesman for arvato mobile said that the firm already had content agreements for individual countries with other music firms, including the world's second-largest music label Sony BMG, which Bertelsmann co-owns with Sony.
Source: http://today.reuters.co.uk
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