Taiwan's Planetmg.com Offers Paid Downloads

Online music site PlanetMG.com launched March 15 in Taiwan, continuing the Asian rollout of Sony's vision for secure, paid music downloads. A division of Sony Marketing Asia-Pacific, PlanetMG uses Sony's proprietary ATRAC3 compression technology for secure music downloads and piracy prevention.

Visitors to the bilingual site (it is available in Mandarin and English) can sample songs for free but need to pay $1.99 to download tracks that can then be played on a PC or ATRAC3-compatible MP3 player. Most non-Sony MP3 players are unable to play ATRAC3-encoded songs.

"It makes sense for Sony to have a site to allow online access to music sales and promotions," says Paul Tan, regional business development manager at PlanetMG. But Tan also recognizes that the company will face an uphill battle trying to cope with Taiwan's burgeoning piracy problem.

A six-month police crackdown on piracy last year saw 20% of cases coming from university campuses, where students were caught downloading MP3s from such sites as Napster and local peer-to-peer site Kuros.

According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry's Taiwan office, piracy cost Taiwan's music industry $100 million dollars in 2000, with illegal MP3s becoming a growing problem.

"There's a lot of work to do. It's a tough business," Tan says. "But there's two reasons for people [to use PlanetMG]: better quality and added value, such as giveaways."

PlanetMG was first launched in its home base of Singapore last October (Billboard, Sept. 23, 2000), before expanding its service to Hong Kong and Australia.

PlanetMG is confident that its pay-for-use model will succeed in Taiwan. "It's just a question of time before people start to pay for online music," contends Nicholas Koh, regional manager of PlanetMG.

The Taiwan launch saw much discussion of Napster and the popularity of online music, while PlanetMG kept pointing to the illegality of Napster and its numerous "colleagues."

In addition to a download service, Tan says, the company is working on a subscription-based service that will allow listeners to get streaming audio for a flat fee.

Tan refuses to comment on current revenue from the site but says he is satisfied with results to date. Tan says PlanetMG doesn't make forecasts of future traffic and revenue but is confident the site will be successful.

The site features a large array of Taiwan content, with fans being able to download songs from such acts as Sony's most famous locally signed artist, Coco Lee.

While the site is still dominated by Sony, such independent labels as Taiwan's Crystal Records have signed up to sell songs and promote their artists. Crystal Records managing director Ren Chiang-da says he doesn't expect many sales from the site. "I don't think it will help a lot. It's just a symbol," he says. "It's a good way to promote our artists."

The site currently has around 400 songs in its catalog, with about half that number from Sony artists. Tan expects another 300 songs to be added by the end of March, with further additions from Sony's library as they become encoded and cataloged.

The collection currently includes songs from Crystal's two top acts, 1976 and Groupie, while older works from Sony's online catalog include selections from Aretha Franklin and Van Morrison.

While none have yet signed up, Koh says the site is open to the idea of bringing other big record labels on board, something that would go a long way toward making PlanetMG a true one-stop shop for music sales.

An executive from a rival top-five label says that if the right deal were struck, then it would consider joining the site. Of chief concern would be whether other labels would get a fair run against Sony artists.

Koh dismisses concerns about Sony dominating the site. "We belong to the [Sony] hardware group," he explains, "so that makes us independent of the music group." Likewise, Koh says that if an "appropriate" technology came along that could match the security and reliability of ATRAC3, then the site would support it.

As well as being a stand-alone site, PlanetMG has partnered with Taiwanese broadband Internet service provider GigaMedia, which will integrate Planet's content into its own lifestyle sites, while providing surfers with the chance to buy online through PlanetMG.