We7- based in London and financed by rock star Peter Gabriel himself - is a new music download service that will offer free songs tagged with 10-second advertisements. The launch of We7 – in late April 07 - was an interesting acknowledgment that pirate web sites offering music for nothing have made many young people reluctant to pay for songs. Even Apple’s iTunes store is dwarfed by the scale of illicit downloading. We7’s pitch is that it can provide well-targeted advertising to listeners, that will be less intrusive than traditional advertising thus driving more crowds to its site. tracks will be in the MP3 file format, and therefore free of copyright protection and capable of being played on any MP3 player. We7’s “off-web” delivery system is based on patent-pending technology developed by MediaGraft. It enables to ‘graft’ audio/video messages to be downloaded with music/video tracks. This means that listeners ‘take away’ ad messages with them after they have browsed a website, then play them on any portable devices, multiple times,.
A short advertisement will precede each track downloaded; after about four weeks – when the song had been listened to three, four or five times – We7’s users would be able to download an ad-free version. Those who don’t want to wait will have the option of buying tracks without the advertisements. The advertising revenues will be shared with the artists and performers.
Before financing We7, Peter Gabriel founded OD2 (On Demand Distribution), a digital-music business that provides copyright-protected songs to Microsoft’s MSN and other online music stores that use the Windows Media format.
