Falling CD sales in both the US and now the UK have been attributed to the ever-popular illegal file sharing programs such as Kazaa and Morpheus.
AOL are the biggest US ISP, giving them probably the best opportunity to try and convince users to pay for music downloads. With this in mind, a new service will be offered to their members offering 20 streamed songs and 20 music downloads for around £2.50 a month. This does not allow the user to burn to blank CDs, although the option is available to anyone wishing to spend more.
So how many songs are there to choose from? AOLs service uses MusicNet – which has a database of over 250,000 songs which should be enough for most listeners ;)
Both AOL and Musicnet are very confident in being able to turn the whole music piracy issue around, but many companies have already tried and failed to gain any significant users behind their services. Perhaps AOL will be big enough to succeed where they have failed.
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