Yahoo-Kimo offers music on the Web

Undaunted by rampant unauthorized downloading of online music, Yahoo-Kimo Inc (雅虎奇摩), one of the nation's largest Internet portals, unveiled its online music store yesterday, which will be inaugurated this afternoon.

"We will bring quality and affordable service to music lovers in Taiwan, while ensuring the interests of copyright holders," Dennis Yang (楊志光), director of Yahoo-Kimo's entertainment business service, told a press conference yesterday.

"Yahoo-Kimo Music" offers unlimited online and offline copyrighted music listening for a monthly fee of NT$149 (US$4.6), the same rate as its local rival KKBOX, which entered the market last October.

Copyright

Yahoo-Kimo has worked with major record labels to obtain copyrights and is offering more than 200,000 songs in its store, ranging from mainstream pop songs in various languages, to music videos, to folk songs, as well as ring tones and ring-back tones, and including original scores such as the Electric Glove Puppet Show.

Another selling point is a rich collection of classical songs from Naxos, the world's leading classical music label, marking the first time it has authorized its works to an online retailer, Yang said.

By logging in on a Yahoo-Kimo account, users can play music online or download audio files to their computers. But the downloaded files can only be played on the computer using a Yahoo-Kimo Music player.

To lure more consumers to site, Yahoo-Kimo is offering a free trial of the service from today to March 27.

To meet growing demand to upload music files into digital music players, Yahoo-Kimo Music will also introduce a file downloading service starting next month, with an average charge of NT$30 to NT$35 per download, Yang said.

The files are in the WMA format, which is digital rights management-wrapped, instead of the common MP3 format to address safety concerns, Yang said.

As such, users will need to have a digital music player that supports the WMA format to play files downloaded from Yahoo-Kimo Music.

The iPod, for example, does not support the format.

The problem can be solved by burning the music files onto a CD and then transforming them into MP3 files, he said.

With the prevalence of broadband Internet access and digital music, Yang estimated that the online music store would secure 300,000 members in the next two years.

"We believe the timing is good to bring the service to local music lovers," Yang said.

Tough market

However, several of the company's predecessors have encountered difficulties after entering the online music market.

IBIZ Entertainment Technology Corp (艾比茲娛樂科技), the nation's first online music store, which in November 2003 offered authorized music files for downloading, closed last May as a result of huge losses.

QBand, another online music store run by BenQ Corp (明基), also suspended its service in the beginning of this year after two years of operation.

The firms were defeated by peer-to-peer file-sharing providers such as kuro.com.tw (飛行網), which is the largest operator. Kuro provides unlimited downloading for a monthly charge of NT$99.

Although Kuro executives were found guilty of copyright infringement last September, Kuro still has more than 400,000 members, while KKBOX has 130,000.

Yang said that in light of Yahoo-Kimo's quality service and products, along with its Internet portal -- which has a large base of users -- the company is confident that its music retailing business will grow gradually.