Sony Launches Irish Music Download Service

NetImperative: After recently celebrating its 1 year birthday, Sony Connect has launched its newest online store in Ireland - offering 600,000 songs for $.99 (Euro) per track utilizing its jukebox software, SonicStage. In a PC strategy, similar to  Apple's on the Mac, Sony has opted to continue going down the slippery slope of offering a proprietary and closed format (i.e., ATRAC3 & OpenMG DRM) for their download and device compatibility. Good for hardware sales, but not for the consumer...The new Irish online store includes music from all major labels - in addition to over 700 independents - but is still way behind in terms of catalogue depth...The service will also include local and international content, local news and artist information. (Sony Connect has already been launched in the UK, France, Germany, Monaco and the Netherlands.)

SiliconRepublic reports, “Connect is all about quality and choice in a networked world,” says Sushil Teji, general manager, Sony Ireland. “It allows consumers to enjoy music in more ways than ever before by offering a truly easy-to-use service with seamless connectivity to secure Sony portable audio devices...Really?  I thought consumer demand, evident from filesharing usage, shows that we'd like to have a plethora of choices and retain the rights to play what we buy anytime on any device, which is why MP3's have become the defacto standard (which Sony portable devices only recently started supporting...) However, looking at the big picture, Sony still has two competitive advantages: it offers more than one portable device that can play the music it sells and it owns a substantial music catalog - so the company doesn't have to pay as much in licensing fees as other stores...