The Sky Is Falling! Major Label To Offer Catalog As MP3’s? Limewire Goes Legit?

If you can get passed its new password protected wall (an interesting move at a time when most content providers are taking their walls down) Digital Music News has two stories that confirm our belief that 2007 will be the year of the MP3.

They quote an unamed "high-level major label executive"  as stating emphatically that one of the four major label groups is readying a significant MP3 push.  "The label is going to make a large
portion of its catalog available as MP3s" the executive told the publication.
They guess that EMI is the front-runner given recent experiments with  the format. Recent comments and a Norah Jones MP3 by EMI controlled Blue Note would also support that hypothesis.  But we wouldn’t count out WMG who tried hardest in 2006 to stay ahead of the technical curve and is prone to grand Wall Street pleasing moves.

There were also new comments yesterday from former EMI exec Ted Cohen on a story reported yesterday about his pitch to labels for a trial of DRM free content by dominate P2P
Limewire. “You are not going to stop it now," says Cohen. "If you shut LimeWire down,
everybody is going to jump to something else." So Cohen and
LimeWire are pushing a strategy of 99 cent downloads via the P2P.  “At the end of six
months, you will know if they are willing to pay or not," Cohen states.  "The worst result is that after six months, we find out
that it was all about free."