Aigo Music, a digital music downloading website, announced on April 3 that it has entered into a strategic partnership with Warner Music, one of the world's four major music companies, to develop a market in China for legal distribution of digital music. The Aigo site, aigomusic.com, was created last October by Beijing-based Huaqi Information Digital Technology, China's largest producer of MP3 players under the Aigo MP3 brand. Huaqi is seeking to make its Aigo MP3 player and the Aigo online music store into China's iPods and iTunes.
Aigo wasn't the first to partner with a music company. Beijing-based top100.cn; Shanghai-based Shanda's digital home entertainment product and website EZ Pod; and Shenzhen's A8 Music have teamed up with well-known music companies from both China and overseas. Each of them is trying to build its own legitimate music library through copyright purchases. Taihe Rye Music, a record company founded by an investment pool in March 2004, promotes its own artists and their new songs and albums through its Tailenet.com site. Taihe became known in the industry because it was the first to enter into digital music publishing in China. In October, Softbank Asia bought a 30% stake in Taihe for $10 million -- a sign that the legal Internet music market may finally have a budding chance after being long overshadowed by rampant piracies.
Digital music can be divided into online music and mobile music; each broadcasts, respectively, through the Internet and a mobile telecommunications network. Online music is downloaded from the Internet to computers or digital music players. Mobile music mostly targets cell phone ring tones and "color ring back tones" -- music downloaded for listening while a caller waits for a call to be picked up. Another type of mobile music developed recently is cell phone music -- downloaded wirelessly and played through software preinstalled in the phones. It remains to be seen if there is a market for this new type of mobile music because it is still at a test stage.
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