Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 14 August 2008 20:07
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 3
Announced at the Australian launch of Windows Vista on January 30,
2007, and due to launch in April 2007, Australian music store “Sanity”
has finally launched Australia’s first music subscription service on
the 14th of August 2008. Is it worth it?
Billed as “Australia’s largest independent music retailer”, Sanity Entertainment operates a chain of “bricks and mortar” music and DVD stores in retail locations Australia-wide, and is well known to Australian consumers.
Slated to introduce a music subscription service in
April 2007, with over 1 million tracks to choose from at a cost of “around a couple of CDs per month”, the service simply disappeared, until yesterday’s announcement, and personally I had forgotten all about it!
It comes a day after Telstra, Australia’s dominant telecommunications company and operator of Australia’s biggest ISP, BigPond, has
announced its music store will now sell DRM-free MP3 tracks at AUD $1.69 each, mimicking Apple’s own DRM-free music catalogue found within iTunes.
It also comes on the same day that Apple has
announced that movies have finally arrived for sale and rental from the Australian and New Zealand iTunes stores, so while the announcement is significant, it comes during a flurry of competing digital media announcements.
Called “LOADIT”, the service costs AUD $29 per month, offers a selection of more than one million tracks, lets you download up to 300 tracks per month (or 3,600 tracks per year) and only works with Windows Media Player 11.
Given that it is a subscription service, the songs are surely encoded with the relevant Windows Media DRM to ensure copies can’t freely be made, although once again the press release doesn’t explicitly say this one way or the other.
Anyone signing up for a 12-month plan will receive a “free portable music player”, although the brand and capacity was not disclosed in Sanity’s press release, however visiting the LOADIT
website, you can see that the player comes with 1GB of storage and can be augmented via a memory card to a maximum 5GB total.
In addition, you can download those tracks to any mp3 players that is either “Plays For Sure” compatible or are “Windows Vista Certified” – so whether this means it will also work with Microsoft’s Zune, which is still officially unavailable in Australia, is unclear.
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