Business Plan

1. Mission

To provide customers with online music, and the ability to listen, download, e-mail and share this music at a low price.

2. Strategy

Music4ever.com's strategy is based on four key strengths that are believed to support competitiveness, scalability and sustainable growth.

1. Low unit cost - Music4ever.com keeps unit costs low (cheap downloads) by

* Eliminating all sales intermediaries between the customer and Music4ever.com

* Focusing on internet sales

* Eliminating unnecessary service frills

* Establishing a long-term relationship with suppliers

2. Strong branding

3. Commitment to customer service

4. Multi based network

3. Situation Analysis

a. Competitive Environment

Music4ever has identified the various competitors that exist in the music industry, the presence of big digital music providers and what they are doing. Wide ranges of activities are carried out to satisfy their customers. Some of the providers investigated are napster.com, realMP3music.com, real networks.com and AOL.com amongst others.

RealMP3music

They have an unlimited selection plus unparalleled support. The site is very user-friendly focused at making its ideas for beginners through experts. There is only a monthly fee of $.99 for unlimited access. No additional per download fees, and provided is a great technical support. The site is fast and easy to navigate. There were tools on the website to deliver songs with excellent music quality from various networks. Tools to download everything from Rock to pop including complete CDs and albums. Available were excellent search tools to search by artist, genre, and CD title or song etc.

One can also download unlimited movies including xxx to kid's movies and either watch them right on your computer or burn them to CD or DVD.

The $.99 per month is a flat fee, there are no additional costs, and no additional charge per download for anything you download.

They have a promotion in place join and get a free desktop MP3 player or movie player.

Download speeds are excellent, as was compatibility with both MAC and PC. The site is also compatible with phone modems (AOL) and broadband (cable and DSL).

Napster.com

Napster, now owned by Roxio, was the original pioneer of free music downloading but ran into a liitle trouble with the law, which the law won. It has now been reborn with the same brand name but little else more.

Although a little pricey at $9.95 per month, the new Napster is the place to go for direct downloading of Copyrighted tunes from your favourite Artists. Napster offers great quality, fat downloads and an easy to use interface with a library of 500,000 songs.

For the monthly fee an unlimited access to their growing library of great music for downloading or playing on your computer is guaranteed. The only negative is that you must pay an additional $.99 per song if you want to burn. Napster operates a pay per burn sites.

Napsters services are easy to use, making it ideal for beginners and intermediate downloaders.

Using the five porter's model to analyse the competitive environment:

Rivalry amongst existing customers:

* The e-commerce has reduced differences among the different digital music providers has offerings are difficult to keep proprietary.

* E-commerce has, amongst the digital music providers migrated competition to price. They try to compete by lowering the price of downloading songs, albums.

* There are increasing number of competitors because the Internet widens the geographic market.

* There are increasing pressures for pricing discounts amongst the various digital music providers because the Internet lowers variable cost relative to fixed cost.

* Not much differentiation between services. Price is the main differentiating factor

Bargaining power of suppliers

* The digital music providers have equal access to suppliers and gravitate procurement to standardized products that reduce differentiation.

* Suppliers have a strong bargaining power because they are reputable record companies e.g. Sony, Emi etc.

Bargaining power of buyers

* Bargaining power is shifted to end-users so the bargaining power of the buyers is high

* Music4ever.com has to work toward building a strong customer loyalty because of low switching costs.

Barriers to entry

* The Internet applications are difficult to keep proprietary from new entrants.

* A flood of new entrants has come into the music industry e.g. wal-mart now sells music online, music ring tones can be downloaded to mobile phones via the wal-mart website.

b. Competitive Advantage

Music4ever.com would introduce into the marketplace moving all their services onto the web, as opposed to delivering downloads through a separate software application.

This move is as a result of a broader move by technology, which offers powerful, computing features on the web that were once limited to computer desktops and hard drives. This would be an opportunity to access a broader number of customers because it would be easier for an unsophisticated customer to visit the website and start listening to music immediately than it would be to download a software application, install it and move on to the next step.

Cost Advantage.

Offer low prices to our customers, and also offer to match the lowest price in the market that the customer is able to identify.

Customers would be able to customize their products,