Supermarket enters digital music download market offering superior quality and choice
Tesco.com will open its virtual doors to a new digital download music store today, as it becomes the first major British supermarket to enter the £25 million market.
Tesco.com’s new service is the first commercial music download service where almost all tracks are encoded at the higher quality audio rate of 192kbps, making the music bought of superior sound quality than that of its competitors.
Unlike rival iTunes, the new tesco.com service will run on Microsoft’s Windows Media Audio format so music lovers will have the choice of listening to their music on over 70 different portable music players to fit any style and budget.
"Music fans want to be able to enjoy the tracks they download anytime, anywhere. Because Tesco.com is using the Windows Media Audio format, its customers can choose from a huge range of portable music players. Meanwhile, iTunes users are restricted to a single device," said Gareth Sutcliffe, Senior Business Manager of the Windows Digital Media Division at Microsoft.
Already a top three-music retailer, Tesco’s new on-line music store will offer shoppers the chance to download over 500,000 tunes at a flat rate charge of just 79p for a single track.
Tesco.com Chief Executive, Laura Wade Gery, believes that by offering customers more choice in portable music players and a flat rate fee for tunes the service will appeal to a far greater audience than rival iTunes. She said:
"When you buy a DVD you wouldn’t expect the retailer to dictate what player you played it on would you?
"And yet that is exactly what is happening in this market. As the price of portable digital music players falls, customers will demand more choice. That is what we’re delivering.
"Music buying is changing. We know that for the first time dads are spending more on music each week than their teenage sons, and they’re more likely to be attracted to music players and downloads because of quality of sound."
The Tesco.com store is designed to be easy to use and has a beginner’s guide with jargon buster to help shoppers downloading for the first time.
Notes to Editors:
1. Shoppers should go to www.tesco.com/downloads to access the on-line store.
2. Analysts estimate the digital music download market is set to grow by around 20% over the next three years.
3. All downloaded music is compressed and therefore is very likely to be of lower quality that the original CD. Most music services available today encode music at 128kbps. The Tesco.com music download store will encode music at 192kbps, this is much closer in quality to the original CD quality.
4. Tesco.com has chosen the Microsoft Windows Media Audio file format as this offers customers the widest possible choice of devices where their purchased music may be played.
5. Cable & Wireless provides all of the technical infrastructure needed to deliver the end-to-end music service. Importantly, since downloading music requires large amounts of high quality network bandwith and as the service is located within Cable & Wireless’ international internet backbone, it is able to deliver this today and will provide flexibility as the service grows in the future.
