MusicGiants takes on portable music market

An Incline Village company plans to dominate high-quality music downloads just as Apple's iPod dominates the market for portable music.

MusicGiants offers hundreds of thousands of recordings, and company executives say the quality is seven times higher than other downloads.

"The sound quality we deliver is identical to the CD," says Scott Bahneman, the chief operating officer of MusicGiants. Bahneman and his partners, which include several high profile music giants such Creedence Clearwater Revival's Stu Cook and Doug Clifford, invested their own money to start the company three years ago.

The company now employs 22 and launched the music site in September 2005.

The quality of downloads is important to consumers who listen to music on home audio systems rather than a mobile system such as an iPod.

"The iPod is a great solution for portable music, just as the Walkman was before it, and it works best with how they compress music," Hahneman said.

Tracks to be downloaded from musicgiants.com are compressed at 470-1100 kilobytes per second compared with 48 to 192 kilobytes per second for other download music formats.

"It's a mathematical match to the original. Ours play at 470-1100 kilobits per second so the sound is more rich and robust than what you would hear through an ear bud," Bahneman said.

MusicGiants will soon introduce downloads recordings in 5.1 surround sound.

The company is so confident it knows its audience, that it eschews mass advertising and instead has gone after home entertainment equipment dealers to promote its products. More than 300 dealers have penned contracts to have MusicGiants' software downloaded directly into their hardware.

MusicGiants' targeted audience consumers 25 years or older are paying a 30 percent premium to obtain that sound quality. MusicGiants' downloads cost $1.29 compared with 99 cents for other offerings from Apple's iTunes. MusicGiants customers also pay a $50 annual fee that can be used to purchase music.

He says Apple pretty much has a lock on the portable music market and he's hoping that MusicGiants can do the same thing in the home stereo environment.

The Consumer Electronics Association estimates about 60 million play music on the Windows Media Player which supports surround sound and 35 million homes have 5.1-surround sound entertainment systems.

The idea for MusicGiants was born when Bahneman noticed how much digital technology was changing the way customers purchased entertainment.

"We just jumped in before iTunes was released," Bahneman said of he and his nine partners, "We heard it (iTunes) was coming and music labels were exploding."

That was three years ago. The company metholically developed the concept, wrote the software, targeted its market of high-end home stereo or theatre equipment buyers, made deals with Warner, Universal, EMI, Sony-BMG, the four music producers that own the vast majority of recorded music, and opened its on-line store last year.

"We have licenses from all of them (the producers) and we're the only licensee with the majors of music in full resolution quality," he said.

The company has won the endorsement of artists such as Michael Bolton.

"It's very exciting and promising to know that there's finally a format such as MusicGiants that will reproduce the musical integrity of our work," Bolton has said.