BMG to Offer Digital Downloads
Like anyone else with half a brain, BMG Entertainment is all ready to offer up its wares on the Internet, in the form of digital downloads. Beginning in September, the company will place about 50 songs (ranging from $1.98 to $3.49) and 50 records (ranging from $9.98 to $16.98) on the sales block via certain retail websites. BMG artists include Toni Braxton, Santana, and Whitney Houston. BMG officials have indicated that they might consider offering their music through a subscription model, but are turned off by the prospect of a model that gives users as much as they want for a mere flat monthly fee. Whatever the case, the major labels are certainly jumping on the digitized music bandwagon these days. Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and EMI have all recently announced plans to offer pieces of their roster to folks via the Internet. Warner Music Group is expected to flesh out its own plan for tackling online music quite soon.

[ Since Sleeper was on BMG, they might be offering downloads of their back catalogues. Is this the future of music? I can't imagine buying music without complete artwork and actual disc. There'll always be hardcopy version available for sale, but who would actually buy albums in its entirity digitially ? There might be a better market for "singles" where people who don't want to buy the entire album for a hit single, might invest $2 or so in a download. But even that doesn't sound too appealing. If they offer music not available anywhere else (exclusive b-sides?) then perhaps maybe, but given the Napster thing, you can just trade it with your friends. I hope this Napster thing doesn't force the internet to have special encodings in mp3 files so that it will only play and burn on one particular computer, but it looks like that's the direction things are heading. ]