Tower Records Digital Joins Music Download Market

Tuesday, June 27th, 2006 at 3:20 PM - by Staff

Tower Records launched its Tower Records Digital music download service on Tuesday. Like the iTunes Music Store, the service offers individual songs for US$0.99, and albums for $9.99. Unlike the iTMS, however, Tower's service features songs encoded at 192kbps, a higher-quality recording rate that Apple's 128kbps. All tracks are encoded with Microsoft's copy protection scheme, so users are required to use Windows Media Player. The service is not Mac or iPod compatible.

Tower Records was one of the first companies to start selling music CDs online, but this is its first attempt at a music download service.

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gslusher said:

member since 13 Nov 2002 with 2055 posts, unranked , send him a message or view his profile

Tue Jun 27, 2006 3:51 pm

From the article:

	Quote:
	Unlike the iTMS, however, Tower's service features songs encoded at 192kbps, a higher-quality recording rate that Apple's 128kbps.

In which format? Remember that the iTMS songs are in AAC, which has a higher quality at the same bit rate than MP3 or most other formats. Looks like you may have fallen for the propaganda.

In a similar vein, note the ads that tout that some MP3 player stores more songs than an iPod, though the HDs are the same size. What they do there is to use 64kbps coding.

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