HMV buys half of music download startup HMV has bought half the equity in the music download firm 7Digital to boost its attempts to flog entertainment online. The high street stalwart paid £7.7m to 7Digital's venture capital backers, Balderton Capital and Sutton Place Managers, and to company bosses. Despite pioneering legal DRM-free digital music and partnership …
I guess it will be impossible to find anything, because of all the crap strewn everywhere, and Pimply faced Youfs fuckin' with their mobile phones and playing pocket snooker.
Just like the shop I guess.
Will it also have a sign saying ' This item might be for sale at a lower price somewhere else in the store' if you can be bothered scrabbling your way through all the shite to find it?
I hope they get their act together but I doubt it
icon: Megaphone because that's what you need to have a conversation in the HMV.
7digital is a great service - I hope this gives them the final push they need to break into the mainstream. The same price (most of the time) as iTunes, DRM free and an interface quicker and easier to use than even the most adware ridden bit torrent clients ....
When a service is this easy to use then the only reason you would still download is if you actively feel that pirating music is your right as a human citizen...
7Digital are pretty good.
No shitty DRM, and you can get more than just the usual Top 40 crap that so many other mainstream media outlets try to force on you. I've found some relatively obscure tracks, and at a reasonable price too.
You do need to check the encoding quality though, because 7Digital don't offer all their music at 320kbps as standard (which is a shame). They also source some of their audio from other suppliers and as a result you can end up with tracks that are not at the sample rate / quality advertised by 7Digital (because the suppliers sometimes provide 7Digital with the wrong information).
I've had this problem (the actual rates were far lower than advertised) but when I pointed it out to 7Digital customer services, they immediately refunded my money for the affected tracks.
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.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
