James Delahunty
3 Sep 2004 18:32
It has been reported that Apple Computers CEO, Steve Jobs, offered chairman and group CEO of Sony Corp, Nobuyuki Idei, the chance for Sony and Apple to run the iTunes service together. Jobs made the offer to Idei during Sony Open golf tournament in Hawaii this January. He is reported to have wanted to bring Sony to iTunes to maintain a competitive advantage over software giant Microsoft which launched its MSN music service earlier this week.
Apple launched iTunes in June 2003 and after just one week had sold one million music downloads. In October 2003, iTunes opened its stores to Windows users and selling 600,000 songs a week. By July 2004, iTunes had managed to sell over 100 million downloads. The service now accounts for over 70% of all online legal music downloads. Sony launched its music download service, Sony Connect, in August of this year. In the same month they also launched the NW-HD1, a hard-disk drive based digital music player. Music sold from Sony Connect will only play on Sony music players or with Sony software.
Source:
Yahoo