Open MP3 Music Gets More Support

Filed in archive Companies , Retail on October 19, 2006

Music distributor PayPlay plans to offer its 600,00 song catalog in open MP3 format. The announcement was timed to support the "Day Against DRM". On a practical basis, the decision greatly expands the company's market to owners of iPods, as well as Mac, Linux, and other portable players that are incompatible with Windows Media DRM.

PayPlay's MP3 songs are priced at 88 cents, while the Window DRM versions are 77 cents. Both formats feature high quality 192 kbps bit rate recordings.

PayPlay also offers PayPlay Accounts, a website personalization and payment wallet, and PayPlay widget, a marketing and promotion tool that allows artists to sell their music through MySpace, artist websites and blogs. Its retail stores are PayPlay.FM for music downloads and PayPlay.TV for video downloads (scheduled for early 2007).