EMI Hails Moontaxi

[Toronto, CANADA] The legal wranglings between major record companies and digital music
renegades might be far from over, but that hasn’t stopped EMI Music Canada
from attempting to peddle its offerings online.

The Canadian affiliate of EMI Recorded Music, EMI Music Canada has entered
into a licensing agreement to stream catalogue and new release recordings with
Moontaxi Media (www.moontaxi.com), a Canadian streaming content provider.
This agreement allows Moontaxi to stream EMI copyrights in a non-interactive
format, in exchange for royalty payments. As part of this new relationship,
Moontaxi is in the process of creating their first Web channel for EMI’s Web
site.

“All new media advancements are very important to our worldwide company’s
future,” said Deane Cameron, president of EMI Music Canada. “Therefore we
are proud to be one of the first territories in the EMI family to do an equity deal
with an Internet company. We are pleased to be associated with such innovators
as Moontaxi Media, especially due to their commitment to the fair reimbursement
to the artists.”

The deal could prove successful given Moontaxi’s role as a streaming media
content and distribution provider. In the latest study conducted for Iceberg
Media.com Inc., a streaming audio Internet broadcaster, by market research
company Thompson Lightstone, 15 percent of all adult Canadians or 29 percent
of Canadian Internet users reported having listened to streaming audio or Internet
radio in the last four weeks. An estimated total of 3,414,000 Canadians tuned in
to streaming audio in November of this year, an increase of 582,500 listeners
since September of this year.

But such an online endeavor hasn’t made EMI any more sympathetic to the plight
of digital renegades such as Napster. In fact, only several months ago it took
music-sharing service MP3.com to agree to pay $20 million (U.S.) each to Time
Warner, Sony, BMG and EMI before reaching a settlement in a no-holds-barred
copyright court battle.