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Digital
Kazaa relaunches as legal streaming service
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 5 August 2010
Having learnt nothing from Napster (ie that people won’t necessarily migrate from an illegal download service to a new legal one just because they both have the same name), Kazaa has been relaunched as a new streaming music service. Unlike Napster, the legal version is being backed by its founders, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom.
Its main selling point seems to be that it’s more expensive than its competitors but, with 1.6 million songs, has a much smaller catalogue. Still, it does provide song lyrics alongside a million of those song, so that’s good. No, actually, they’re selling it on the fact that it plays through a web browser and therefore allows users to access and share playlists from anywhere.
Explaining why you’d want to fork out $15 a month for this, Emanuel Krassenstein, Kazaa’s CTO said: “While there is no shortage of smart devices in the market until Kazaa’s launch no one was offering music consumers the opportunity to fully integrate their music into their lives and social networks. The interactive experience is focused on giving consumers music on their terms which will result in more content being delivered and more revenue being generated for artists”.
The service is currently in beta with a fifteen day free trial offered to new subscribers.