It looks like the Coca-Cola Company has decided not to do give up on Digital music downloads despite very recently closing its failing MyCokeMusic store. The MyCokeMusic service originally became Europe's largest legal music download service back in the 1st quarter of 2004 just two months after its launch, however they quickly lost out to iTunes after it launched in June that same year, with MyCokeMusic's service continuously falling further behind from that point on.
With iTunes being a very tough music service to compete with and the iPod series leading the music player market, Coca-Cola has decided rather than compete with iTunes, they would team up with them instead. Their new website will begin rolling out in Ireland, the UK, Germany, Austria and Switzerland on the 9th of August this year. It will feature iTunes integration and is designed to help give exposure to unsigned artists in its countries of operation by allowing them to upload their music to the website.
Like Coca-Cola's original launch of the now defunct MyCokeMusic, Coca-Cola plans to give away millions of iTunes songs to help promote its new website. So far, Apple has already sold over 200 million tracks via iTunes throughout Europe since its launch throughout 17 European countries, with around 150 million of these sold in just the past year. Despite Apple's major success with iTunes in Europe also, they are already running into issues with several European governments for not allowing competing music players to play music purchased from its iTunes store.
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The partnership with Apple forms part of a new music strategy for Coca-Cola, which just weeks ago closed down its own online music store. iTunes' dominance in the online music market in Europe was cited as one of the main reasons for the failure of MyCokeMusic.com |
For Coca-Cola, the iTunes integration will give them the advantage of being able to sell music that is iPod compatible, but at the drawback of leaving out support of all of the music players MyCokeMusic supported (due to different DRM) and potentially having its pricing controlled by Apple depending on its agreement with them. On the other hand, this new website is unlikely going to help it compete with other music download websites targeted at helping unsigned artists that do not resort to restrictive DRM measures, especially with the likes of Wippit that offers an unlimited download plan where its music neither expires nor is crippled with restrictive DRM.
Source: ElectricNews.net
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