ONLINE MUSIC COMPANY PLANS OFFLINE EXPANSION.Byline: Dave McNary Staff Writer Musicmaker.com, which bills itself as a leading Internet site for downloading music, announced Tuesday plans to expand from cyberspace Coined by William Gibson in his 1984 novel "Neuromancer," it is a futuristic computer network that people use by plugging their minds into it! The term now refers to the Internet or to the online or digital world in general. See Internet and virtual reality. Contrast with meatspace. to bricks-and-mortar with walk-up kiosks. Virginia-based Musicmaker.com will open five test kiosks - including one at a yet-to-be-announced location in Los Angeles Los Angeles (lôs ăn`jələs, lŏs, ăn`jəlēz'), city (1990 pop. 3,485,398), seat of Los Angeles co., S Calif.; inc. 1850. - starting next month in partnership with Photo-Me International, which operates 18,300 coin-operated photo kiosks See kiosk. worldwide. The music kiosks, which will have access to more than 10,000 songs, will allow consumers to create their own custom CDs on a song-by-song basis within five to seven minutes or download an hour of music onto a ''flash`` card using the popular MP3 format in a few minutes. Costs will range from $9.95 to $24.95, payable only by credit card, and the CD will be shipped within in two days. If the test program is successful, the companies plan to open as many as 5,000 kiosks in the second half of next year in locations such as malls, railway stations The following is a list of railway stations (also called train stations) that is indexed by country. :Further information: List of IATA-indexed train stations Africa Morocco
''This is a totally new distribution system for music at the retail store level,`` said Bob Bernardi, Musicmaker.com's chairman and co-chief executive officer. ''Not everyone has access to the Internet and even people who do still go shopping at music stores.`` Musicmaker.com signed a three-year $20 million deal last month with America Online See AOL. to offer its products through AOL (A division of Time Warner, Inc., New York, NY, www.aol.com) The world's largest online information service with access to the Internet, e-mail, chat rooms and a variety of databases and services. . The pact guaranteed that AOL would make at least $6 million a year and gave AOL a $2 million stake in Musicmaker.com, which has a library of 200,000 tracks. |
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