New Indie Latin Music Site

Playlist: A new digital music company called Musica360 has announced plans to launch its service this September, but unlike other services who target a broad market and try to encompass every genre, Musica360's focus will be strictly on independent latin music artists. "Musica360 sees a way to compete by offering a specialized service focusing on areas where the major players aren’t competitive." Although the site will have both major label and independent music, the focus will be on smaller U.S. acts initially, including interviews, soundclips and videos.

As a legitimate service, Musica360 will only sell downloads that are legally licensed for distribution from the copyright holders, but in a bold move, none of the tracks will use DRM...The files will be MP3's. Christopher English, founder and former CEO of the upstart hip hop magazine, Hood Grown says, "He looked into DRM, but for a small independent music service, there’s no good alternative to both protect songs, and still reach a wide audience." He argues, convincingly, "that the lack of a DRM doesn’t leave artists any more exposed than they already are with compact discs...What we tell the artists is that if you’re selling the CD, it is the same risk as selling the MP3. A person can take the CD and do what they want with it anyway, no different than an MP3." It looks like they've found an interesting niche with a huge potential audience, but only time will tell if the public will support yet another online store...