Independent digital music firm 7Digital has said it will "take on iTunes" after relaunching its flagship download portal yesterday.
7Digital bosses say that they will offer "greater ease of use" than the market leader iTunes in a bid to take a significant share of the digital music market, though, to be honest, if anything it is probably the offer of cheaper prices - certain songs will retail for 50p - and the fact that non-DRMed music available via the service will come in the popular MP3 format that might best equip the London based company to take on Apple - whose UK price point remains 79p, or 99p for DRM free music, and whose DRM free files use the AAC codec.
Relaunching the main 7Digital.com platform yesterday, 7Digital MD Ben Drury told reporters: "MP3 is really what the consumer wants. We want our songs to be playable on as many devices as possible".
Drury also said that his company would never store personal details of its customers in the files they sell. Those remarks, of course, relate to the fact that the DRM free AAC files sold via iTunes Plus are 'watermarked' so that they contain personal information about the person who bought the track, mainly to discourage them from sharing the file on P2P networks. As previously reported, some in the IT community have expressed concerns that such a practice could risk those customer's personal data being accessed by hackers.
Another extra feature being offered by the revamped 7Digital is the "digital locker" which will allow people to store their music and video collections in an external server and access them from multiple devices. On that feature Drury continued: "In the future, people will have maybe 20 devices around the home. You don't want to have to keep moving your music around all of them".