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New music service offers free downloads
Dean Mortlock
0 comments 01 May 2007
An Oxford-based company is offering downloaders free music and without any DRM from its new service, with the only compromise being the inclusion of short adverts.
With investment by the musician Peter Gabriel, the service (called We7) allows you to download the song for free and then, using technology it calls MediaGraft, adds a 10-second audio advert to the start of each track. At the end of a four-week period, you can then choose to download a new version of the song without the ad – again, this is completely free.
The system works by making sure that the artist gets paid by the advertiser, and We7 promise that the ads will be targeted to specific downloaders, so people will only receive ads that have a relevance to them.
The We7 service has recently gone beta, with a full launch planned for June, but hasn’t yet managed to convince any of the music labels to jump aboard. In fact, the service will initially only offer around 2,000 tracks, but the founders have said that they obviously hope to get more labels onboard in the very near future.
Peter Gabriel, who has also recently backed iTunes plug-in The Filter, said: "We7 provides artists – even across the more experimental or minority genres – with the opportunity to build a new source of income from their music. Ad funded downloads are the way to provide free music to the consumer without depriving musicians of their livelihood."
For more information on We7, go here.
And for more info on The Filter, go here.
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