An iTunes For The Rest Of Us?

Just for laughs I often flip through my (free subscription!) Stereophile magazine. You know, the one with the ads for the $12000 speaker wire and $5000 CD players. Imagine my surprise when I saw a preview of a new music service, MusicGiants, that is offering lossless music downloads for $1.29 each. Targeted to “audiophiles”, MusicGiants is also selling its “SoundVault“, which seems like some kind of Windows Media Center PC, albeit with a $10,000 price tag, and an ability to download the lossless tracks to some portable media players, with the notable exception of the iPod. Oh, and there’s a $50 annual fee (!). Ho hum so far, but then I noticed that the service has significant buy in from most of the major labels, indicating that they seem to have developed some faith in the ability of Microsoft’s DRM to shield their “top quality” downloads from pirates. My thinking on this is that if successful, it should prompt Apple to offer lossless downloads from the iTMS Service, if only because Apple likes to present a “high end” image, and having a competitor actively dissing iTMS by lumping it in, quality-wise, with “pirated music from p2p networks” has got to hurt.

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