Europe's largest supermarket chain, British Tesco launched its own online digital music store today in the UK. Aiming at slightly more "demanding" userbase with higher-than-rivals audio quality (at least in terms of bitrate), the retailer tries to lure iTunes users to switch to its own service. Considering Tesco's massive marketing muscle and the fact that it seems that it can turn anything profitable, it seems likely that Tesco might manage to grab certain significant portion of UK's digital music sales.
But as Tesco has decided to use Microsoft's WMA format, it can't really benefit from the iPod fever that is going on all over the world right now -- iPods wont play WMA files, just like WMA-capable players wont play tracks from iTunes.
Tesco's pricing is similar to most of the competing services in the UK -- each track will cost £0.79 and albums cost £7.99. The service itself is provided to Tesco by Cable & Wireless. Tracks can be burned on to a CD three times and transferred to three different players.
Source: Guardian
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