Had a look through the full product range on Wired and I suppose if I wanted some Louis Armstrong I'd be happish with over 80 of his tracks available for 99c, with a ton of other old school content as well. I don't know how hard this stuff is to get on CD but that's the sort of price I'm after per track.
Currently includes EMI, BMG, Festival Mushroom and a couple of smaller labels content. Everything from The Tea Party, David Bowie, 28 Days, Spice Girls, Alex Lloyd, Ben Harper, The Mavis', Blondie, Bodyjar to name just a few.
Formats are Windows Media DRM (plays in Winamp, Windows Media Player (6.5+) and many other players including PC and Mac) or Intertrust (using MusicMatch).
It's good to see a replacement for eMusic using a format the big labels are confident enough to release their content under. It's also good to see a method for releasing music without the need for pressing CDs, but with still the ability to make money from it.
However, I still have some major issues with this launch...
Price for example. EMI have chosen to release their content at FULL CD PRICES. So a current album is AUS$28.95, and a discount album is AUS$18.95. The Tea Party's 'Edges Of Twilight' CD is AUS$18 at most CD shops, less than the digital download. Same goes for all of the David Bowie CDs. Singles are $8.95.
EMI have (in most cases) also chosen to force you to purchase the entire album/single. You cannot purchase individual tracks, removing one of the major advantages of digital downloads in one stroke.
BMG have chosen to allow single tracks to be purchased at around AUS$3 each. Yay. However if you wish to purchase an entire album it's still AUS$3 a track, making some albums cost over $30 to download...
I don't know the details but I'm sure the EMI decision is based on their original contracts with artists relying on sales per CD, and so allowing the sale of single tracks would confuse their original details. I can see their problem, but the sale price is much too high. In a lot of cases I could order the CD from an online store, have it delivered to my door for less than the digital download, and I wouldn't have to download 50Meg worth of files to do it.
Hopefully we'll see the labels using such a service to release CDs that have been deleted (such as old singles) and that are too expensive to re-release as CDs but they still want to be available.
There are some singles online at the moment but not to the volume I'd want and they're still too expensive. The labels must know they're competing with CDs, not replacing. No-one would be happy to pay the same for a digital download when it's so restrictive and you receive no physical product.
And to top it all off, you cannot burn most of the content on the site to CD (if you're using a CD burning product that respects Windows Media "don't burn" restrictions) and you must be Australian to purchase music from the site.
Still, vending Windows Media tracks work perfectly and is fairly painless although slightly annoying (assuming you've already registered with the site, and I didn't try Intertrust, I dislike MusicMatch too much) and once a licence is aquired for a file, you can play all you want.... on the one computer. Move computers, you have to buy it again. *sigh*
I'm hoping to see rare tracks, WiredRecords only tracks/albums (live/bsides etc), old singles that you can't get anymore, extra discs. Something worth buying!
Of course, if I can't burn what I've bought to CD. I can only play it on the computer I downloaded/licenced under, those restrictions may stop me buying even songs that I want and cannot get anywhere else.
We'll see how well MusicNet and Duet go... except I can't because they're most likely to be USA only. Damn.
(yes, I work for ehyou.com who own 50% of WiredRecords.com with Sanity.com.au. I even did some testing, but my opinions are my own blah blah blah)