![]() ![]() “The ironies are very interesting,” said Drew Larner, Rdio’s chief executive, who says talks with music labels are continuing and confidential. The big challenge will be to get licenses from the major music labels, which have not viewed past digital music efforts by Mr. Rdio is hoping to introduce a music subscription service by early next year that offers seamless access to music from both PCs and cellphones. Moreover, Yahoo, AOL and MTV Networks have abandoned their own music subscription efforts.īut as CD sales continue to plummet, and the music industry searches for a profitable future, entrepreneurs with various approaches say they believe they can finally make music subscriptions work. A few hundred thousand Rhapsody and Napster subscribers pay monthly fees of around $15 for the right to stream an unlimited number of songs, at any time, from their PCs and mobile devices.īut with modest membership growth at best, neither service has managed to challenge iTunes, with its many millions of users or enticed music lovers from pirating music. ![]() Rdio and similar start-ups are reinventing a concept pioneered earlier this decade by Rhapsody, a service majority-owned by RealNetworks, and the tamed version of Napster, now owned by Best Buy. The two have created and financed a secretive start-up called Rdio, with offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco. In 2001, they created and financed Kazaa, one of the original peer-to-peer file-sharing services that hurt the music industry. ![]() The latest and perhaps most surprising entrants to the field are the European entrepreneurs Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. That isn’t stopping a new batch of entrepreneurs from trying to make it work. SAN FRANCISCO The idea of selling monthly subscriptions to a vast catalog of online music has met with only limited success. ![]()
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