14 DAY TRIAL // Sony Ericsson made deals with 10 important record labels and announced that its popular over-the-air (OTA) download service, PlayNow arena, will be expanded with more than 5 million new tracks. The announcement was made at the MIDEM (the world's largest music industry trade fair) conference in Cannes, and come together with the launch of PlayNow Uncut (previously known as M-Buzz), a music promotional web-space for new, unsigned or developing artists.
The record labels that made agreements with Sony Ericsson are Sony BMG, EMI, Warner Music Group, IODA, X5 Music, The Orchard, Hungama, Bonnier Amigo, The PocketGroup and VidZone. The Swedish-Japanese company is negotiating with other regional labels to bring even more tracks for PlayNow arena and broaden its variety of music.
Introduced in February 2004 as the easiest way to pre-listen and then buy polyphonic ringtones directly on your mobile device, Sony Ericsson's PlayNow became a hit among mobile users and is now available in 32 countries, reaching more than 200 million annual downloads. PlayNow arena, the latest evolution of PlayNow, offers access to an expanded range of content and combines the power of the PlayNow catalog with unique features like TrackID, which can identify songs in order to be downloaded to user's phones or PCs.
"We are delighted to announce deals with such high caliber record labels. This will help realize our vision for PlayNow arena as a service that will be developed in collaboration with our partners," said Anders Runevad, Sony Ericsson's Executive Vice President, at MIDEM in Cannes. "Our commitment is to work with the industry to ensure we are building an experience-based and intuitive content delivery platform, enabling the development of an ecosystem that provides a unique experience for the consumer and a business model where everybody prospers."
PlayNow Uncut can be accessed at this address, while the PlayNow arena website can be accessed at this address, although for the moment it's just a "Coming soon" page there. The site will be launched in May 2008 in Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark. Future launches will follow all over the world, until the end of the year.