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Yahoo readies Japanese music service

Yahoo Japan, with the help of a Sony affiliate known as Label Gate, will soon launch a digital music download service.

Yahoo Japan has about 39 million visitors each month and is consistently ranked as JapanÕs number one web destination which will be a major plus for the digital music site to compete with the grow market.

Label Gate currently has a download services, known as Mora, and offers 73,000 tracks from 39 domestic record companies. The digital music download service will offer its tracks in SonyÕs proprietary ATRAC3 format which will restrict their playback to some models of cellular telephones, NetMD type MiniDisc players, ATRAC CD players and the recently offered PlayStation Portable. Tracks will cost between ´158 and ´368.

Label Gate started in 2000 with only a few record companies backing however, has steadily grown. The Mora digital music service was launched in April 2004. In October Label Gate started a second service called Music Drop that worked with the Windows Media format.

Macworld UK - Yahoo preps Japanese music download service