British music and entertainment retailer HMV is planning a social networking site and DRM free downloads. The site is expected to be launched in September with at least 1 million digital downloads available.
The idea is to “reintroduce the days when music fans used to meet at brick-and-mortar music stores to socialize and exchange information on their favorite acts and concerts” says Billboard.
The site will feature original content, says HMV UK’s Gideon Lask.
Not only but also “HMV has signed a letter of intent with EMI Music, which will supply its DRM-free catalogue once an agreement is reached” says the story, going on at several named independent labels will also make their catalogs available as MP3s.
HMV says it’ll incorporate its download site www.hmvdigital.com, into its main physical CD and DVD mail-order site www.hmv.co.uk.
HMV Downloads Suck
All this sounds good but actually what HMV is offering is pretty useless. It is a Microsoft based system and unfortunately HMVdigital.com does not support Firefox. Even worse none of the downloads are iPod compatible.
Not that you would want to buy video downloads from HMV anyway but HMVdigital.com is still not stocking video downloads, despite having 2 year old plans to do so.
[Content in whole or part adapted from p2pnet and is licensed under Creative Commons]
