Mighty Gadget Blog: The latest technology news & reviews in the UK

Sick of feeding the pockets of the Apple Monster, or want to start paying for your “downloads” so not to be breaking the law. Well UK high street entertainment chain HMV have re-launched it’s digital service(yes they’ve had one for several years now) to include 10 million songs and the certainly very interesting UK Top 40 tracks for a meagre 40p per track.

This has mainly come due to the fact the cd singles market is dying with many now only available on download only which means going to iTunes or Amazon to get a “legal” download of said songs. HMV is obviously the only high street trader now of entertainment product and have now started to dabble in other entertainment forms to keep the business modern and up to date with the acquisition of the MAMA group (HMV now have their own branded music venues like the HMV Forum and HMV Apollo) which in turn leads to their ticket sales service through HMV.com and are also having their own branded cinemas too.

What has pushed HMV to re-launch it’s digital was it’s multi-million acquisition of the digital music provider 7Digital. This then added more expertise in the digital music field and added a significant number of digital tracks to HMV’s disposal. 7Digital provides Spotify with it’s music and if you’re a user you’ll know the sheer scale of what they can offer to their customers.

So what does it offer over Apple other than the price? Well the new HMV digital service will be compatible with all mp3 players(previous incarnations had only wma support) and the majority of the tracks it provides have a bitrate of 320kbps to Apple’s 256kbps (some are lower on the HMV site due to “historical hangovers”. Not only this but purchased tracks can be synced using iTunes or Windows Media Player and if you happen to delete your track by accident, you can re-download without being charged again.

The 40p chart titles is only a limited time offer with no exact date for finish. Can HMV take a chunk out of an iTunes dominated market.

7Digital will be the default music app for Blackberry users thanks to a deal signed up between the two companies. 7 Digital which recently had 50% of it bought by HMV offers 100% DRM-free downloads and has a rather extensive library.

The price war between 7Digital and iTunes has started already with 7Digital cutting the price of singles to 77c a track, to iTunes 99c per track. As per usual though the UK wont benefit from it as  both companies still sell tracks to us at 79p.

Coming first to the Curve 8900, the Bold and the Storm it will come head to head with iTunes and Nokia’s “Comes with Music”. Over the next few weeks/months it will be added to more of its phones.

7Digital’s music is encoded at 320kbps, larger than your average mp3 but obviously a better quality than what iTunes offers to you. It also has a good little tool called “Wi-Fi Auto-Sync”. When the phone is connected to your mobile network, it downloads lower audio quality versions of tracks, then upgrades that to full quality when your phone's in range of a faster wi-fi connection. Clever eh?

It is rumoured that Apple is currently in negotiations with Universal, Warner and Sony BMG to secure the rights for its iTunes website to distribute music without DRM.

This could have very big implications for Apple and the music industry as a whole as DRM has always been one of the main talking points of downloadable music. The music industry has typically been pro DRM to stop piracy while the end user is normally anti DRM as it has a tendency to screw the user over by restricting what you can play the files on.

If iTunes manages to secure the deal it could mean that people without iPods will be able to download music from iTunes and play on whatever device they want.

Currently Play.com and 7Digital already offer DRM free music, and there are rumours that Sony may also be ditching DRM however iTunes has the largest catalogue of music and therefore it would be a significant deal.