Scandinavia Company’s deo.com Friday signed an agreement with Microsoft to use the Windows Media
Audio 4.0 for the safe transfer of music over the Net.
Microsoft (MSFT)
said it will market deo.com, Europe’s leading music portal for the digital
distribution of music on the Net, on several of its sites in Europe and the
U.S.
In exchange, deo.com will lend its content to Microsoft’s site.
“Our collaboration with deo.com enables thousands of users to download
music over the Internet,” said Lars Backhans, Nordic Head of Microsoft
Consumer and Commerce Group. “The new features of WMA mean that we have
CD-quality, in spite of the size of the downloaded files being only half
that of MP3 files.”
Music sold from deo.com will be distributed digitally to the computer or
stereo via coded digital formats. deo.com hosts a complete music store
containing information and services for music consumers and has the
capacity to store consumer’s personal music library. The company hopes to
bulk its listing to 1.5 million titles over the next two years.