Steff.me

While I may be late to the party on this one, I thought it may be worth a mention. One of my favourite online retailers, Play.com, announced that they were going to offer music downloads. When the news of the MP3 store from Amazon.com came out, I was rather irritated that there wasn’t a non-US version that I could try out. Now, finally, there’s another place I would go to in order to buy music. PlayDigital, the Play.com download service, is UK only, or at least for those with a UK billing address.

The PlayDigital service can be wrapped up as follows,

• tracks are in a DRM-free, MP3 file format
• 192Kbit/s or 320Kbit/s encodings
• 100% legal — cool, huh?
• no software to install
• single tracks starting at just £0.65 GBP

On top of that, the PlayDigital downloads work with any MP3 player, including the iPod! That’s right, if you own an iPod you can use this service. Thank you, Play.com, for assuming your consumers are idiotic enough to not understand that the iPod is not just a portable media player that can only play music purchased from the iTunes Store. Childish ranting aside, I do find it pathetic that this has to be pointed out as a form of sales pitch.

Also, one warning they stick within their FAQ section, that should be highlighted, is,

PLEASE NOTE YOU CAN ONLY RE-DOWNLOAD A LIMITED NUMBER OF TIMES.

While I’m unsure of how many times that is, it’s good that re-downloading of tracks is possible and very easy to do.

Album artwork may also be included with the purchase of a track or album. To receive the artwork simply select the “Download all” option; this downloads a .zip file, containing all the tracks and any artwork that is available.

Play.com also claim to be adding thousands of songs every day, which I really hope is true since their library of songs can’t compete with the iTunes Store. Current/recent tracks just don’t seem to appear as quick, however it’s still very early days for the download service.

One thing that the PlayDigital service beats iTunes for, other than the DRM-free tracks, is the price. A single track from iTunes costs £0.79 and £0.99, for the DRM and DRM-free versions respectively. Since a DRM-free MP3 from Play.com costs just £0.65, it really comes in at a decent price point that would make me consider buying from them rather than the iTunes Store.

As of right now, I’m sticking with iTunes. Why, though, I’m not sure. When I want to buy an album, I usually head over to Amazon or Play and buy the physical CD. When I want to buy a single track, iTunes is just so much quicker and with such an extensive library, it seems so much easier to use it than anything else.