A trip to Play.com before the weekend lands (if I want something for any given weekend I’ll usually order by the previous Friday) tells me they’re now doing music downloads, DRM-free music downloads at that.
Price-wise, it’s 50c more per track for Irish users in comparison to iTunes and you can only purchase if you’ve got yourself a UK debit / credit card. Plus, the currency conversion is a little sketchy. For you regular UK readers, however, you’re looking at £0.65 or £0.70 per track.
Quality-wise the downloads will vary at either 192k or 320k in MP3 format only and if you’ve a few pennies saved in advance of a band’s new album you can also pre-order your digital downloads to get them on the day of release. If you need to re-download the album for any reason, you can do so as well but you’ll be restricted to the amount of times you can download any given purchase.
BBC reported earlier in the week that you’d be able to pick up albums from as little as £4.95. It will be interesting to see what, if any, dent Play’s new PlayDigital service will put into the iTunes UK store.
Thanks for the heads up Ken, interesting to see the market shift.
Given the popularity of Play.com it will be interesting to see what impact they’ll have on the market.
They’ve developed greatly over the years (some stuff I still wish they’d ship to Ireland, but hey!) so it seems a logical step for them.
I reckon they’ll hunt for digital film downloads next, can’t see why not.