“Tesco is to start selling iPods as part of its expansion into the lucrative digital goods market, it announced today. The move will put the supermarket in competition with electronics-only chains. It is part of Tesco’s plans for its non-food sector which last year saw a 17% sales increase, with home entertainment sales up 20%,” Louise Barnett reports for Press Association News. “The UK’s lucrative MP3 market grew by 400% last year and is expected to double in 2005, the retailer said.”
“Digital products will be stocked in 200 Tesco stores [across the UK] by the end of next week, with MP3 players available in 69 of those… Shoppers can also download music online at Tesco.com,” Barnett reports.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Tesco seems to know that every iPod they sell will be one more potential customer Apple’s iTunes Music Store and one less potential customer for their Tesco music download store. Tesco’s FAQ states, “Most portable music players support the WMA Codec. Music downloaded from this site is encoded in WMA format. To ensure that your player is compatible with Windows Media Player, look for the Microsoft Windows Media logo on the box, or within the instructions for the player. Unfortunately Apple’s iPod uses an encoding format that is unique to Apple and the iPod. Therefore the Apple iPod does not directly support transfer of files in WMA format downloaded from this site.”
By “most portable players,” we assume Tesco is referring number of also-ran brands and not the market-dominating Apple iPod lines which have easily sold “the most” units, by a very wide margin, of any portable player.