2009-12-01 02:21:00 - DRM-free music downloads with no registration

Tradebit, Inc has just announced a joint venture with UK music distributor 7digital to provide DRM-free music downloads of four million songs to their customers worldwide. What makes this development special is that online customers don’t have to register and provide personal information before purchasing the music as MP3 files.

Tradebit.com think this privacy feature will distinguish its e-commerce site from the crowd of online music retailers.

Digital rights management, or DRM, is a method of restricting the use of digital media downloads such as videos or music. The intention is to protect artists from piracy. Many music lovers have long seen DRM as unnecessarily restricting. Online media retailers like Tradebit.com are finding a ready and enthusiastic market for content free of

DRM restrictions.

Since 2004, Tradebit.com has offered a self-service marketplace where artists and vendors can sell their own downloadable content online. Tradebit.com merchants can upload and sell their content using PayPal, Google, and other direct debit methods for payment processing. The range of available media on Tradebit.com includes almost anything from automotive shop manuals to romance novels.

The music downloads now available at Tradebit include major artists and most downloads include brief samples that allow customers to listen before they buy. Tradebit’s partnership with 7digital expands the available music to over 5 million music files.

Unlike most online retailers, Tradebit does not require customers to register personal and contact information with the site before purchasing content. This helps mitigate security concerns for customers and expands the appeal of e-commerce to a broader clientele.

“Most of the traffic on Tradebit.com comes from search engines or the merchants themselves. We don’t need to know the identity of the purchaser to provide the vendors with the tools and platform they need to sell and deliver product,” says Founder and CEO Ralf Schwoebel.

About Tradebit.com

Tradebit hosts over 25,000 merchants selling over 10 million files. Prices range anywhere from a few pennies to hundreds of dollars, depending on the content and what the merchant wishes to charge. Traffic on Tradebit.com has exploded in recent months to over 150,000 unique visits each day. Merchants can have direct links to their own branded sites to mutually build sales and site traffic. According to Alexa.com, the site ranks in the world’s top 4,000 most visited sites and in Quantcast.com’s top 2,000.With offices in both the US and Germany, Tradebits offers their site in English, German and Spanish. The Italian language site is scheduled to launch by Christmas 2009.