(Nikkei BP Group)
(No.1 High-Tech News Site in Japanese)
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| Internet Music Sales Agent Liquid Audio to Set Up in Japan
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August 14, 1998 (TOKYO) -- U.S. music distributor Liquid Audio Inc. plans
to establish a Japanese corporation in October or November.
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Bill Woods, marketing communications director of Liquid Audio, told Nikkei
MAC that the company will launch its music distribution system in Japan
using the Internet. That system is called Liquid Music Network (LMN).
It has been available in the United States since mid July.
LMN uses the company's music streaming/download distribution server,
the Liquid Music Server. Using the Liquid Audio format with sound quality
close to CDs, the LMN service enables music distribution safely, piece-by-piece.
When an order is placed on the Web pages of record companies, artists
and shops, it will go through to Liquid Audio's servers to deal with
electronic commerce and data distribution.
Currently, the Liquid Audio format is encoded by "AC3" (Dolby Digital)
developed by Dolby Laboratories Inc. of the United States. However,
Liquid Audio is expanding to be able to use Advanced Audio Coding (AAC),
which has an encoding rate that is higher than Liquid Audio. The company
plans to release version 4.0 of AC3 at the end of September.
AAC is likely to be adopted by Japan Broadcasting Corp. (NHK) for BS
digital satellite broadcasting.
(Nikkei MAC)
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