News

Tower to Open Digital Music Store

By Ed Oswald | Published June 26, 2006, 3:45 PM

Music retailer Tower Records will unveil its digital music download service on Tuesday, complete with 1.2 million tracks priced at 99 cents per song. Powered by Puretracks, tracks would be provided in Windows Media Format, Reuters reports.

As with the company's brick-and-mortar stores, Tower's digital store will provide a range of music across many genres not commonly found in other retail chains. Additionally, the company plans to offer the files encoded at a higher bitrate to increase sound quality.

Any player that can support protected Windows Media files would be able to use the service, which means users of the iPod cannot playback Tower's tracks on their players. Songs would be downloaded from the Tower Web site, and would be burnable to CD.

Tower plans to prominently market the download service to its customers in its 82 retail stores, such as offering deals that would bundle CD purchases with digital downloads. Other discounts would also be offered, the company says.

The new store joins an ever-growing lineup of Windows-based music services that are fighting for a small chunk of the digital music market. According to data from the NPD Group, Windows Media-based services make up less than a fifth of total sales. Apple's iTunes currently leads the market by a wide margin.

Comments

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spiffyjeff
Jun 27, 2006 - 1:56 PM

:p on wma and tower - looks like i'll stick with allofmp3.

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PC Rat
Jun 26, 2006 - 9:09 PM edited

...

This represents a major paradigm s***.

'Big Box' music stores selling discs (vinyl or CD)
are as dead as downtown Department Stores !

In electronic format, ~users~ decide the media.

It's all about convenience and choice.

...

The Computer Rodent

...

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Paul Skinner
Jun 26, 2006 - 6:02 PM edited

More .wma files; just what the world needs.

"Any player that can support protected Windows Media files would be able to use the service, which means users of the iPod cannot playback Tower's tracks on their players. Songs would be downloaded from the Tower Web site, and would be burnable to CD."

Therefore they ARE able to put them on their iPods as they can rip them back from the CD into a sensible format.

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spiked
Jun 26, 2006 - 7:53 PM

Burning then ripping a CD also happens to be the way you can get songs out of iTunes' protected files "into a sensible format."

Since everybody winds up going to CD at some point, maybe Tower should sell songs directly on CD. What a brilliant idea! Oh, wait...never mind.

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skags442
Jun 27, 2006 - 3:22 PM

lol

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