MusicMatch today launched its own online music store. MusicMatch offers “200,000 songs” priced at 99-cents each, a similar amount to Apple’s iTunes Music Store catalog at the time of Apple’s launch. MusicMatch is currently available to the U.S. The company promises to make 500,000 tracks available by the end of the year, according to Macworld UK.
Downloads are available as 160Kbs Windows Media 9 files. Reportedly, Dell will use a re-branded version of the MusicMatch online music store along with the Dell Digital Jukebox (DJ) music player in an attempt to approximate Apple’s integrated iTMS/iPod approach.
“MusicMatch CEO Dennis Mudd calls his 99-cents-a-song service a ‘breakthrough,’ because he acquired liberal usage rules similar to those in Apple’s acclaimed iTunes Music Store: Buyers can burn songs and transfer them to portable devices as often as they want. Apple’s service, introduced in April, has sold more than 10 million tracks to date. But it’s available only to Macintosh users
