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MusicMatch launched its iTunes-clone

29 September 2003 8:55 by Petteri "dRD" Pyyny | 2 comments

MusicMatch launched today its own clone of highly successful Apple's iTunes service. MusicMatch's service can be seen as the first real "clone" of iTunes as it uses, just like iTunes, the desktop application to deliver and sell the songs instead of traditional website front-end.

MusicMatch has relatively good chances of succeeding as it claims to have delivered over 40M copies of its media player software, MusicMatch Jukebox, to Windows users. Definitely the funniest thing about the whole situation is the fact that MusicMatch Jukebox ships as a standard application with Apple's iPod, portable digital music player, for Windows users.

MusicMatch's store operates on same principles that Apple's does -- each song costs $0.99, can be burned to a CDR and transferred to portable digital music players. This is a sharp contrast to Buy.com's web-based music store that was launched earlier, which has severe restrictions on purchased tracks and pricing of tracks varies based on the record labels' decisions.

According to rumours, Dell is planning to launch its consumer electronics and digital music products by simply re-branding various products -- Dell will most likely use now-launched MusicMatch Jukebox as the Dell re-branded frontend to its own music store and its first digital music player seems to be re-branded version of Creative's portable MP3 player.

MusicMatch's store sells tracks only in WMA format and tracks have 160kbps bitrate. Music store is currently available only for U.S. customers and has a selection of over 200,000 tracks. MusicMatch has promised to increase the selection to 500,000 by the end of the year.

More information:

Macworld
USA Today

Permalink to this article

Yahoo! buys MusicMatch for $160M (14 September 2004)

Real launches RealPlayer 10 with AAC support and music store (7 January 2004)

iTunes: over 20M songs sold (9 December 2003)

PayPal wants its share of digimusic biz (8 December 2003)

HP to launch online music service (3 December 2003)

MusicMatch: remove your iTunes (4 November 2003)

iTunes for Windows launched (16 October 2003)

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Discuss this article!
Ghostdog (Senior Member) 29 September 2003 9:43
Huhm, 160kbps WMA files? [ + quote]
Shegax (Junior Member) 30 September 2003 20:24
Crapy A$$ $hit Shega (adrenaline Is the closest Total freedom) [ + quote]