In Monday’s (12/7) Guardian (London), Katie Allen reports, “The dominance of Apple’s iTunes store in the music downloads market could suffer a blow after the launch of a new price comparison site from TV consumer champion Martin Lewis. The money saving pundit’s latest venture shows music fans where they can get the cheapest downloads from a number of music sites and allows them to click through to buy those songs. The iTunes store, the market leader in online music sales, is crowded out by cheaper rivals such as Tesco and we7 and fails to appear as offering the lowest price on any one of the current top 40 albums. Susan Boyle’s best-selling album, for example, is shown as available for £3.97 via Tesco and £7.99 on iTunes and HMV. Lewis said such price differences, and the fact no single seller always comes out cheapest every time, motivated him to create Tunechecker.com, which follows a handful of other price comparison sites into the music market. … Lewis said one of the starkest findings in his market research was a lack of knowledge among iPod and iPhone users about what services they can use to get music on to their devices—about half believed they could only use iTunes.”
Posted December 8, 2009
