BlackBerry Music Store: Too Good to Be True?
Blackberry users are getting a new digital music store that’s often cheaper than iTunes, Amazon, and basically every other competitor in the U.S. How do they do it?
United Kingdom-based 7Digital, which was founded five years ago, tells Macworld UK that the majority of its tracks cost 77 cents, and most albums are priced at $7.77 — an obvious play on the company’s name. If you don’t have a Blackberry, you can still access the store on the Web, at us.7digital.com. Browsing the Web store, I see plenty of tracks priced at 77 cents. But, I also many tracks cost 99 cents, and albums that cost $9.99, but often times these are songs that cost $1.29 a piece on iTunes.
The store itself isn’t too shabby. 7Digital says it has 7 million DRM-free MP3s available, compared to iTunes’ 10 million as of January. At 320 Kbps, the MP3s are of higher quality than other stores, and there’s a neat feature for Blackberry users: Download a song over a 3G or slower connection, and the file quality will be lower, but it will be automatically replaced with a 320 Kbps download when you reach a Wi-Fi hotspot.
There’s got to be a catch, right? I mean, after The Great iTunes Price Hike of 2009, in which the cost of many popular iTunes tracks was raised from 99 cents to $1.29, the competition followed suit. Lala, which raised its prices alongside Rhapsody, Amazon and Wal-Mart, chalked the price hikes up to "an industry shift."