Online music distributor Ecast Inc. has closed its downloadable music operations, saying it couldn’t spend the marketing dollars needed to compete with Apple and other online music stores, according to a Los Angeles Times article.
The iTunes Music Store opened approximately two months ago. Its success (over five million tunes sold to date) has spurred Amazon.com, Yahoo, and Wal-Mart, among others, to explore competing offerings with several music industry executives predicting more downloadable music stores to open by Christmas, the LA Times reports.
Ecast’s Rioport division, which employed 25 people in San Jose, California, was expected to supply some of those stores with music and technology. But there’s more talk than check-writing going on, Ecast CEO Robbie Vann-Adibe told the LA Times. Now Ecast will focus on supplying restaurants, bars, and similar places with jukeboxes stocked with music and other digital media from the Internet, the article adds.