MELBOURNE – May 7, 2004 - destra Corporation Limited (ASX: DES), Australia’s pioneering Digital Rights Management (DRM) provider, has signed another major music retail chain – Leading Edge to provide music online through Leading Edge’s website: www.leadingedgemusic.com.au.
destra’s CEO, Mr. Domenic Carosa said, “With the addition of Leading Edge’s 200 retail outlets across Australia, we can continue our ‘click and mortar’ strategy strengthening destra’s as Australia’s No1 Online Music Company.”
Leading Edge has over 200 stores across Australia and represents over 12% of all music sold in the AUD$1 billion Australian music market.
“We want to maintain our market share in the rapidly growing online music market. It represents an ever increasing percentage of all music sold in this country. destra has the technology and expertise to help us maintain our lead,” said Leading Edge’s CEO Gavin Ward.
In December 2003, DestraMusic (100% owned by destra) was the first company in Australia to launch a legal music download service, offering digital music through it’s online retail partners – Sanity.com.au, ChaosMusic.com, HMV.com.au, and JBHiFi.com.au, with just over 200,000 tracks from the major record companies such as BMG Australia, EMI Music, FMR, Warner and Sony Music Entertainment.
DestraMusic plans to increase its music catalogue to over 500,000 tracks which will be available for purchase by mid-2004. “The music is in the WMA Format and has built in technology so that customers can copy songs onto a CD (up to three times), or a portable media player. The technology does not allow the tracks to be transferred to pirate websites,” said Domenic.