EMI gives Passalong DRM-Free Music
Following on the heels of licensing DRM-Free music for sale through Amazon’s music store and Apple’s iTunes, music label EMI this week extended a similar offering to lesser known music retailer Passalong Networks.
320kb DRM-Free downloads will be available for all EMI tracks sold through Passalong’s Storeblock’s music platform. Storeblock, is a technology and music sales and distribution platform widely licensed to businesses to power their own private-label online music stores.
As a business to business (B2B) application platform Passalong Networks and their Storeblocks technology are not widely known names with consumers, but the Tennesee based company powers more than 100 online music stores and has a catalog of more than 3 million songs including more than 2m from independent artists.
Passalong was started in 2002 by people with both technology and media backgrounds. The company’s CEO was a pre-IPO technologist at Microsoft and it’s VP of Strategic Marketing was formerly a Senior Vice President at EMI; a factor that likely played a significant contributing part in this new licensing deal.
