7Digital Rule
Like most people I had ignored the exsistance of 7Digital until last week when I decided to go legit and buy some hard to find music. (ok the real reason was it was impossible to find the songs I was looking for using the usual methods)
Living in Ireland we have a limited number of online MP3 vendors serving this country as iTunes dominates the market so much.
So I did some searching and saw 7Digital in the Google results, which reminded me that they are the music store of choice for the Songbird Music Library. Songbird is a great piece of cross platform software that mashes up the web and media in to one fairly robust offering. And it's developed using the Mozilla App framework, gStreamer and has some of the original guys from Winamp behind it.
So I fired up Songbird and opened the 7Digital store. The customer experience was fantastic, the song previews loaded within the local media player. The purchase was optionally storing my details to make the experience simpler next time. I added the songs to my basket and once they were paid for I was redirected to a download page. Once the download page loaded, Songbird started to instantly download the songs to my library automatically.
What is even better is that 7Digital remembers what song you have bought, so at any stage you can log into your account, go to "My Locker" and download again the songs you have already purchased. This is great if you have multiple systems in different locations or if your music collection somehow gets wiped.
Let's hope with HMV's backing 7Digital will start to eat up the dominant market share that iTunes currently has a hold of so that music is freed up for everyone. Legally.