Warner Music International plans to sell music from its subsidiary Rhino globally, focusing on mobile and online sales channels. One of the first major initiatives is the launch of Rhino’s first-ever dedicated wireless service in Japan, which will be a mobile website with a flash interface targeted at the 30+ crowd. It will sell content including mastertones, video tones, full length tracks as well as images such as artist pictures and album artwork. For some reason WMI has decided to go with a subscription model (no mention of price, but the launch date is Feb 5th)...while a lot of people think the subscription model will do really well in mobile music, the site will include only 200 artists...which doesn’t seem like enough to maintain demand, even though Rhino has some big names like Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, The Doors, Black Sabbath, Alice Cooper and The Monkees.
Other countries targeted include the UK, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Scandinavia, Finland, Benelux, Australia, Japan, Brazil, Mexico and Canada, and long-tail enthusiasts will be pleased with the Out of Print series, which has over 1,500 titles made available digitally after being deleted from physical product lines. There are a number of other collections, ie the Songs You Know mobile range which will have classic catalog ringtones, full-track downloads and videos promoted exclusively on mobile, and mobile content is a part of most of the packages mentioned. I think the packages offered are good, but WMI needs to choose its business model carefully. (release)