We7 – the ad-supported music download service based in the UK backed by Eden Ventures and Spark Ventures – has signed a deal to add 400,000 tracks from EMI Music’s repertoire of artists, including, appropriately, We7 founder investor Peter Gabriel. The tracks will be available through both on-demand, ad-funded audio streaming and paid-for MP3 downloads. We7’s advertising technology plays short audio adverts before each streamed track, sending royalties back to rights owners.
Interestingly the service is still not fully launched – but plans to do so “later in the year”. We7 competes with the much larger and older LastFM, and a host of others to a larger or lesser extent including Imeem, Deezer, songza, SpiralFrog, HypeMachine and Seeqpod.