MELBOURNE – 1 April, 2004 - destra Corporation Limited (ASX: DES), Australia’s
pioneering Digital Rights Management (DRM) provider, have announced today that they
will compete with Telstra’s offer of 99c per track for the month of April by undercutting it
10c to 89c per track for all of its online catalogue of music.
destra’s CEO, Mr. Domenic Carosa said, “We have been selling “legal” music for the last
three years and we will not be undercut by Telstra or any other new player to the
marketplace.”
DestraMusic.com (100% owned by Destra) offers online digital music through its online
retail partners – Sanity.com.au, HMV.com.au, JBHiFi.com.au, ChaosMusic.com.au,
Rome Technology, eChoonz.net, Whammo.com.au and Dick Smith with over 200,000
tracks from the major record companies such as EMI and Festival Mushroom Records,
BMG and Sony who are vying for the lucrative digital music marketplace.
DestraMusic will increase their music catalogue with plans to have over 500,000 tracks
available for purchase by mid-2004.
The music will be in the Windows Media Player format and will have built in technology
for customers to copy the songs onto a CD three times, as well as to a portable media
player, but will not allow the tracks to be transferred to pirate websites.
“We have built-in technology that will give the record companies protection from
copyright violation, but will allow customers to make copies to CDs for playing in their car
or portable CD player,” said Domenic.