is an online music and video store for the Japanese market operated by Sony Music Solutions, a part of

Sony Music Entertainment Japan , often abbreviated as SMEJ or simply SME, and also known as Sony Music Japan for short (stylized as ''SonyMusic''), is a Japanese music arm for Sony. Founded in 1968 as CBS/Sony, SMEJ is directly owned by Sony, Sony Group Corporation and is ...

(SMEJ). It is integrated into the Japanese version of Sony's Music Center for PC software, and was also integrated into its predecessors such as SonicStage. It is now the official store for their

Walkman is a brand of Personal stereo, portable audio players manufactured by Sony since 1979. It was originally introduced as a portable Compact Cassette, cassette player and later expanded to include a range of portable audio products. Since 2011, ...

devices.

History

When Sony released its NW-MS7

Memory Stick The Memory Stick is a removable flash memory, flash memory card format, originally launched by Sony in late 1998. In addition to the original Memory Stick, this family includes the Memory Stick PRO, a revision that allows greater maximum storage ...

compatible digital

player, Sony Music Entertainment Japan started offering digital music through a store called bitmusic in December 1999. Bitmusic was merged into mora in July 2007. In 2000, Label Gate Co., Ltd. was formed, a joint venture of 17 Japanese record companies including

Avex Group Avex Inc. ( kabushiki gaisha , commonly known as Avex and stylized as avex) is a Japanese Conglomerate (company), entertainment conglomerate led by founder Max Matsuura and headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. Founded in 1988, the company manages J- ...

, and Universal Music Japan, which would then operate the bitmusic store. The mora store was launched on April 1, 2004. At this time Label Gate was funded by 18 companies while 29 record labels were participant. Originally, music purchased from mora was exclusively in Sony's proprietary ATRAC3 format with

OpenMG OpenMG is a digital rights management (DRM) system developed by Sony for managing and protecting digital music data on a personal computer. It was originally designed for audio files in ATRAC3 format; the compliant software, e.g. Sony SonicStag ...

DRM. A partner store called was also in operation, using

Windows Media Audio Windows Media Audio (WMA) is a series of audio codecs and their corresponding audio coding formats developed by Microsoft. It is a proprietary technology that forms part of the Windows Media framework. Audio encoded in WMA is stored in a digi ...

(WMA) codec and Windows Media DRM encryption, and integrated into the Japanese version of Microsoft's

Windows Media Player Windows Media Player (WMP, officially referred to as Windows Media Player Legacy to retronym, distinguish it from Windows Media Player (2022), the new Windows Media Player introduced with Windows 11) is the first media player (application soft ...

11 as the "recommended store" in Japan. On October 1, 2012, mora underwent a rehaul into a DRM free store, selling songs and music videos in

Advanced Audio Coding Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is an audio coding standard for lossy digital audio compression. It was developed by Dolby, AT&T, Fraunhofer and Sony, originally as part of the MPEG-2 specification but later improved under MPEG-4.ISO (2006ISO/ ...

(AAC) formats. The mora win service was also eliminated in the restructuring, with the DRM free store being integrated into the Media Go service in Windows 8. One year later on October 17, 2013, mora began offering songs and albums as 24bit/96kHz

FLAC FLAC (; Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software ...

files. Label Gate merged into Sony Music Solutions in 2021.

References

External links

* (In Japanese) Online music stores of Japan Sony Music Entertainment Japan Sony Music Avex Group Universal Music Japan Universal Music Group Mass media companies based in Tokyo {{Japan-company-stub

History

See also

References

External links