It has been reported over at Techcrunch that UK music retailer HMV has announced at its AGM that they will be buying a 50 percent stake in online music retailer 7Digital for £7.7 million. The move looks set to give HMV a ‘great leap forward’ in digital, since 7Digital has been fleet of foot in pushing non-DRM MP3s, open formats and signed deals with tech rock stars like Spotify. CEO Ben Drury, CTO James Kane and other managers are staying on and will be joined by three more from HMV on the JV board.
HMV Group will now use the five year-old 7Digital as its sole supplier for “all of its existing digital operations” in the UK and Canada. 7Digital will also be used to build a new e-books and audiobooks store for HMV’s Waterstones subsidiary, an area previously untouched by 7Digital. HMV’s own effort, GetCloser.com, has bombed, so this deal probably couldn’t come soon enough.
It is great to see that HMV is actually trying new model and markets. It was even reported a month or so ago that HMV had signed their first ever band to a record label, The Boxer Rebellion.
U.K. based digital music store 7digital has launched in Sweden. The store, which sells MP3s from all the majors and various indies, is up and running at http://se.7digital.com from today (Aug. 12) and will offer 4 million tracks. Swedish independent distributors on board include Bonnier Amigo, Artspages and Phonofile.
The launch of the Swedish store is the company’s first in Scandinavia and will be followed by the launch of stores in Norway, Finland and Denmark. 7digital service is already operating in the U.K., Portugal Austria, the Netherlands, Italy, Ireland, France, Spain, Germany and Belgium.
Swedish customers pay seven kronor (96 cents) per track and albums start at 79 kronor ($10.87). The 7digital catalog will also be available to Swedish music fans via integrated download links within streaming services Spotify and Last.fm.
“Our Swedish offering continues our European expansion of local download stores and international partnerships,” said Ben Drury, CEO of 7digital, in a statement.
On the Blackberry App World, UK-based 7digital is prepping an over-the-air download store for delivery in September, according to several reports. First-run countries include the UK, US, Canada, France, Italy, Germany and Spain, and downloads will be delivered as one-off, a-la-carte songs. Blackberry owner RIM believes that music is a big part of the mobile experience and they really want to be at the forefront.
Additionally, Shazam has sorted out their Blackberry Storm application. The Shazam update applies to the UK and North America, and unlike the iPhone, it includes a tiered pricing model – free for a limited version, $4.99 or 5 pounds for a more comprehensive edition.
7Digital and Spotify have announced a new partnership that will see 7Digital purchasing links in the Spotify platform. This partnership is aimed to help Spotify increase revenues in this very difficult economic situation that is heavily affecting online advertising revenues.
Beginning with the UK, France, Spain and Germany, the deal enables Spotify users to purchase 320kbps MP3 downloads from 7Digital’s 6M track catalog along with a selection of FLAC downloads. Sweden, Norway and Finland will follow in a few weeks. In the future, users will be able to purchase playlists that have been created within Spotify at a discounted price. Future improvements will include closer integration including one click downloads.
The Spotify deal follows a similar 7Digital partnership with open source media player Songbird using 7digital’s API which allows integration with 7digital’s catalog and commissions on sales.
7digital (the UK based mp3 store) has started selling music from Universal Music today. This is the first time in Europe the tracks have been offered in 320k mp3’s, and seems to be selling both the new releases and its back catalog.
Hypebot mentions that it is quite strange that there was no formal press release by either party. Here at RouteNote we would be very keen to talk to a representative from 7digital about including our catalog in their system.
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