Joint venture gives Melodeo market in China

Seattle-based Melodeo is eyeing China's 350 million mobile subscribers as a prime audience for buying songs delivered to mobile phones.

Melodeo said Thursday it had formed a joint venture with wireless data company Access China to begin offering its services to Chinese mobile carriers this year.

The joint venture, yet to be named, will launch the first platform in China to deliver secure digital content through wireless operators and other mobile-service providers, Melodeo said.

Access China is a subsidiary of Japanese company Access, which provides Internet technologies such as browsers for mobile phones.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The partnership is intended to bring together Access China's resources, contacts and technical skills and Melodeo's intellectual property and relationships with major record labels, said Stan Sorensen, senior director of product management and marketing at Melodeo.

Melodeo also chose Access for its "proven track record" of safeguarding intellectual-property assets while doing business in China, he said. Based in Beijing, the joint-venture company will employ 50 to 75 people.

The joint venture will license Melodeo's search and digital rights management (DRM) technologies to handset makers in China and Japan.

Illegal downloading of songs from the Internet is common in China, and the four major record labels have tried to limit how much music they release into the Chinese market because of the lack of protection, Sorensen said.

Since the service hasn't been offered before, it remains to be seen whether Chinese consumers will pay to download songs to their mobile phones. China now has the largest mobile-phone market in the world.

With its DRM technology, Melodeo aims to broker deals between the labels and Chinese mobile carriers China Unicom and China Mobile.

"Getting more music into a market that's hungry for it today is one of the things that will cause people to pay," he said.

Compared to the United States, mobile carriers in China have more control over a phone's features, so Melodeo expects it can run on at least 80 percent of handsets in China, rather than fewer than 30 percent of the handsets in its home market.

Kristi Heim: 206-464-2718 or kheim@seattletimes.com