Bleep.com: Nearly Unknown Music Store Beats iTunes for UK Music Award
Bleep.com is a UK-based online music store in the tradition of Emusic.com. Like Emusic.com, it offers a variety of music as DRM-free MP3 files from a large selection of independent labels. But Bleep.com has improved on Emusic.com and is offering full-length previews of tracks before purchase. Files downloaded from Bleep.com are encoded as 320kbps MP3s instead of 192kbps files offered by Emusic.com for better sound quality. Blogs can even embed track previews in posts, like this:
Emusic.com has also been criticized for offering a much smaller selection of music to non-United States customers. This is because Emusic.com has to deal with different licensing agreements in different countries or regions and isn’t allowed to sell all of its music outside of the United States. Bleep.com has managed to license its content for all users worldwide:
Q: I AM IN ALASKA/THE NORTH POLE, DOES THAT MATTER?
A: As long as you have an internet connection and a fairly modern browser (Internet Explorer 6, Safari 1.0, Firebird 0.7) you can access and use Bleep.com anywhere in the world, whether using an Apple Mac or a Windows based PC. Lots of bandwidth and a fast connection obviously helps too!
Last week, Bleep.com recieved some attention in the press when it recieved a UK Music Award for Best Music Store and beat out much larger competition:
There was surprise that iTunes, responsible for 70 per cent of UK paid-for downloads, lost out in the best music store category to independent music specialist, Bleep.com.
Bleep sells MP3 downloads with a much higher sound quality than iTunes, for 99p a track. The downloads can be played on iPods and any other MP3 player because they are free of the “copy protection” used by competitors.
While Bleep.com is a still fairly new in the online marketplace, it has managed to win a major award on the strength of it’s high-quality, DRM-free offerings. While independent labels continue to eat a large share of online music sales, major labels still refuse to give customers high-quality music that plays anywhere.
As the customer base for online music develops a better understanding of the issues involved with DRM and is exposed to stores like Emusic.com and Bleep.com, it is likely that demand for DRM-free downloads will increase. In an online word where it is just as easy to type Bleep.com as it is to type Rhapsody.com, consumers will naturally move towards options that don’t frustrate their attempts to play back their own music. The only advantage of music stores like Rhapsody.com is the major label content. But with independent record labels like V2 Records (The White Stripes) or TVT Records (Lil’ Jon) blurring the traditional line between “Major-label” and “Independent”, a transition is already happening. More and more popular music is showing up in DRM-free music stores. This trend is likely to continue.
technorati tags:bleep.com, drm, music, store, itunes, itms
2 Comments so far
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I have used Bleep.com before, it really is a good little site, if slightly disorganised. I’ve also purchased 2 albums from them as well, something I would never do from iTunes because of the restrictions on the files.
I also never share my music (except stream it) so bleep.com has nothing to fear from me by selling me unprotected files. I’m also grateful somebody did create an online music store that goes against the trend of the other stores.
[…] Nearly Unknown Music Store Beats iTunes for UK Music Award Bleep.com is a UK-based online music store in the tradition of Emusic.com. Like Emusic.com, it offers a variety of music as DRM-free MP3 files from a large selection of independent labels. But Bleep.com has improved on Emusic.com and is offering full-length previews of tracks before purchase. Files downloaded from Bleep.com are encoded as 320kbps MP3s instead of 192kbps files offered by Emusic.com for better sound quality. Blogs can even embed track previews in posts, like this: […]