14 DAY TRIAL // Surprisingly or not, Sony has decided it's high time to rethink its businesses. So, it announced its plans to shut down Connect music store by earlier next year. The fellows from Sony brought this news to light during a recent public announcement of its A810 and S610 brand Walkman players.
The store was established back in 2004, when it was indented to control both the music download service and the players it would use, just as its main competitor, Apple, did.
Moreover, the company said it is ready to move to an open platform, choosing Windows Media as the copyright format. This, of course, will lead to the elimination of the ATRAC format that was used until today. The older file format was used by both Connect store and the Walkman players.
In case you were concerned how this would affect Sony's eBooks, the company has already reassured the owners of the Reader handheld that they're not going to suffer any major change.
Consequently, Sony's services through the store are going to remain the same, at least until March 2008, as the official representatives said. The major consequence of the shut down measure is definitely going to be the one that concerns the downloading of the songs, as the buyers are not going to be able to redownload the content again, in case of losing it after the closure.
Therefore, all the customers of the store were asked to choose between burning audio CD copies from protected files from Connect and using a newly introduced MP3 tool that will be advanced enough to transcode unprotected ATRAC to a specific file format, guaranteed to work on Sony's new addition in its portfolio.
In fact, much of the company's failure is said to be attributed to the fact that they used exclusively ATRAC format, which meant less players to convince the users to accept being locked into the proprietary music format.
As expected, this announcement is bringing a breath of fresh air on the market and marks a new important chapter in its competition with the big fish in the electronic industry. The measure was taken as the store failed to achieve a significant success on the market, which eventually led to a lost battle against iTunes, on its own territory in Japan.
We shall see if it's the right move!
