In an attempt to compete with rival Amazon.com, online retailer barnesandnoble.com will
expand its product offerings to include focused collections of music and
videos in the first quarter of 1999.
The soon-to-be IPO is following Amazon.com’s lead, which began offering music and video selections at its site earlier this year.
“While our site will offer virtually every available CD, our merchandising will be focused on classical, opera, jazz and show tunes,” said Steve Riggio, chief executive officer of barnesandnoble.com. “That
approach has been very successful in our retail stores. . .We intend to have the same focused approach to video, emphasizing documentaries, travel, how-to and tons of hard-to-find foreign films.”
The company also signed an exclusive agreement with the All-Music
Guide/All-Movie Guide entertainment databases. Under the agreement, barnesandnoble.com will have exclusive online rights to the databases. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
The All-Music Guide database covers both current and historical music data for
more than 300,000 albums, including artist biographies, music reviews, album
ratings and
information such as suggestions on other artists with similar music styles.
All-Movie Guide covers more than 140,000 titles and provides synopses, artist
biographies, movie ratings and, listings of casts and characters.