News Download battle reaches Europe

From the Beeb:

Microsoft has launched a music download service in Europe after the success of a similar service run by rival Apple in the United States.
Microsoft's MSN Music Club allows fans in the UK, France and Germany to buy single songs from 75p, or 0.99 euros.

It is being billed as the first pan-European pay-as-you-go online music shop.

Apple's iTunes, which offers songs for $0.99 (62p), was an instant hit when it launched in the US in May - but Microsoft has beaten it to the European market.

Through Microsoft, fans can buy more than 200,000 songs from all five major record labels - roughly the same as the iTunes catalogue.

Many tunes are priced at 75p, with more popular songs at 99p and "gold" singles at £1.19.

Gold tracks are new singles, available as soon as they are sent to radio stations - up to six weeks before the CDs reach shops.

Full story here

Prices sound reasonable, TBH - but I can see this prices dropping though, once iTunes (both Mac and PC) makes it to Europe and we see a bit of competition.

 

And here I am sharing my MP3 collection like a sucker. I could be charging a quid a song!

 

What rate are they though? good quality (200+kbps?)

 

what gets me is why apple can't manage to make a service that both mac and pc can use, I don't know that much about the service but I would think it is probably web based, it seems like they are just shooting themselves in the foot AGAIN, by excluding the majority of computer users from there products! Its probably just sour grapes on apples part like with logic (which really got my goat up) where they bought out emagic and stopped development of logic for the pc altogether.

 

No idea. I've just tried looking on the MSN Music Club site, and I can't find it anywhere. The site's pretty, but that's about it. I'm not entirely sure if MSN acctually provide the service anyway, as they're music 'partner' is Vitaminic

iTunes uses AAC / Mpeg4 Audio at 128bit which is aledgedly indistinguishable from the source.

 

128Mbit indestinguishable from a CD - PAH! Tell that to an Audiophile.

 

hmm the good thing about iTunes is every song is 99cents while these other companies say they charge 79 when in fact the price is ranging from 79 to 1.19

I like itunes

/me runs aways before he gets hit again for standing with Mac

 

From the iTunes Website:

Just remember that this is not MP3. And you shouldn't knock it until you've listened to it. But hey - what do I know. I rip my CD's at 128bit as MP3's, and TBH can't tell the difference.

 

Yea I know I cant...I actually think that alot of my 128bit mp3s sound better than their 192bit counter-parts *same song just ripped twice*

 

Same here; i ripped them at that for lack of HD space at first (90-odd cd's and a 7GB drive...). But i've tried them at 192Kb/s and tbh i can't really tell the difference enough for me to rip 5000 files again...

 

350kpbs OGG VBR here.

Superb. Wouldnt do anything less than 256k.