Liquid Audio Adopts Microsoft’s Digital Media Platform

Liquid Audio has announced that it will add support for Windows Media Technologies (WMT) throughout its music distribution services. The small but influential company, which provides online services to record labels and music retailers, plans to offer encoding and distribution of music in Windows Media format; to deploy Windows Media Servers in its data centers; to incorporate Windows Media Digital Rights Management into its rights management services; and to support Windows Media format files in the next release of its client player. The partnership suggests that Microsoft’s release of WMT 4.0 has given it a lead over RealNetworks in a technology crucial to the future of music sales online: secure digital downloads.

Worldwide recorded music sales totaled US$38.7 billion in 1998, and a large slice of that market is expected to move online. Music producers, such as the big five record companies—BMG Entertainment, EMI, Sony, Universal, and Warner (EMI and Warner have just proposed a merger)—can choose to digitize (encode) their music for online distribution in various download and streaming formats, including Microsoft’s Windows Media Audio (WMA), RealNetworks’s RealAudio, and Liquid Audio’s Liquid Tracks formats.