Barnes & Noble Opens Online Music Store
The music-loving cyber shopper has yet another online superstore to
add to their bookmarks: Barnes & Noble. The bookstore
(www.bn.com) expanded its catalogue today (July 7) to include
thousands of music titles.| The launch places Barnes &
Noble.com into a highly competitive market ruled by fellow online
bookseller Amazon.com and brimming with other competitors,
including CDNow, Borders.com and retail music stores that have
started to take to the web as more and more music buyers make
online purchases.
“We are not the first,” B&N.com chief executive Jonathan
Bulkeley said in an Associated Press report. “But we aren’t too
late. This party will go on for the next thirty or forty years…if
not longer.”
The site features artist bios from AllMusic, and an opportunity for
users to add their own reviews of albums to more than 50,000
already archived album reviews. Links to “similar artists” and
“roots and influences” are also listed, as well as connections to
books by and about the artists.
The Barnes & Noble.com site will also offer songs available for
downloading; the first up is a previously unreleased live recording
of “Deep Water” by Jewel.