MELBOURNE – June 3, 2004 -destra Corporation Limited (ASX:DES) Australia’s No 1 Digital Rights Management (DRM) provider, has signed Australia’s No 1 Car Audio Retailer – Strathfield Group Limited (ASX:SRA) to provide online music through their website, www.strathfield.com.au.
destra’s CEO, Mr. Domenic Carosa said, “With the addition of Strathfield’s 85 store retail chain across Australia, we can continue our ‘click-n-mortar’ strategy maintaining destra as Australia’s No 1 online music company.”
“The convergence of technology between mobile devices and portable music players see the sale of online music as a logical extension for Strathfield. We need to be in this space and destra has presented Strathfield with a unique opportunity by generating revenue for us without the hassles of stocking the product,” said Strathfield’s Managing Director, Mr. John Winstanley.
Strathfield has over 85 stores across Australia and is widely known for selling digital mobile entertainment devices such as Car Audio, MP3 players and mobile phones.
Strathfield will also sell digital music online through their mobile phone retail website, www.gomo.com.au.
DestraMusic.com (100% owned by destra) was the first company in Australia to launch a legal digital music service in December 2003, offering music through its network of online retail partners. Today DestraMusic offers over 200,000 tracks from the major record companies including BMG Australia, EMI Music, FMR, Warner and Sony Music Entertainment.
“Consumers are more comfortable embracing new technology when it is provided by a brand they trust and recognize. Our partnerships with retailers such as Strathfield help achieve this objective,” Domenic added.
DestraMusic will increase their music catalogue with plans to have over 500,000 tracks available for purchase by mid-2004.
The music is in the WMA 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 give the record companies protection from copyright violation, but will allow customers to make copies to CD for playing in their car or portable CD player,” said Domenic.