I must have been sleeping while this happened. Most people know LimeWire as software used to illegally download software, but it also has a legitimate music store and it just added 1.2m tracks beginning at $0.27.It's so new its "still in beta", but it already has thousands of tracks and albums there and even plenty you would have heard of. A quick look and I saw some Marvin Gaye, Kimya Dawson, Tindersticks, Josh Rouse Lloyd Cole and The Streets and much more.LimeWire software is apparently still installed on as many as 18% of all PCs worldwide. That is a huge amount of machines downloading music although it has slipped from its heyday on the back of the success of BitTorrent.The good news is that the LimeWire store has teamed with indie digital distribution firm The Orchard, which distributes more than 1.2 million songs, from the likes of Big Star, Bob Marley, Damien Jurado, The Fall, Keane and The Pet Shop Boys among thousands of others.It is never going to compete with iTunes, but it does offer somewhere else to go and it does offer savings on some of its subscription packages offering 75 download credits for $19.99 a month, which works out to $0.27 per track. Interestingly the LimeWire store is linked to the illegal filesharing software so that users will be offered the chance to buy stuff...as they illegally download. Might work.
Does anyone use LimeWire?
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Sounds a LOT like emusic - whose subscribption model for anything from £10.99 per month for 30 songs will drop to 20p per song as you go up in commitment. And the music available looks spookily similar.
Of course, prices in the UK are a LOT higher than in the US, where the same (ish) 30 tracks would cost... $11.99. And 75 tracks at 27c each... I know the exchange rate is coming back down, but that's still a huge premium to pay for being British.
See I'd not heard of that either. Lazily using iTunes, sleep walking into the future.
"Currently the LimeWire Store is available to US residents only.
We are working to secure international licensing agreements as quickly as possible."
The new version of <a href="www.rosoftdownload.com/.../a> is introducing a filtering system to encourage safer, more responsible file sharing. Copyright owners interested in blocking their files from being downloaded, uploaded and shared are invited to learn more. In my opinion, this is a good thing
Gordon Macmillan
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