Play.com to start online music store

The rather popular (on the UK) online retailer Play.com, has plans to start a download music store which will be named PlayDigital. The price for each song can be considered high, with the average being 70 pence, or $1.37 in USD.

On the other hand, all the MP3s will be sold DRM-free, meaning there is no kind of “protection”. This important detail can be one of the reasons why the costs of each file at PlayDigital, is higher than other online stores. Take iTunes for example, while the price per music is $0.99, the file format is encoded in AAC which isn’t supported in all audio/multimedia players. At PlayDigital, they only deliver files in the MP3 format – the universal one.

Currently, there are independent labels and EMI taking part on the new store, but I bet there will be more in the future.

On the announcement, Play.com could only praise itself by claiming the title of “3rd most visited online retailer” in Britain, and sporting a high number of customers, 7 million to be exact.

Wendy Snowdon, from PlayDigital, had the following comments about DRM protected music:

We believe DRM-free digital music is the way that digital music should have always been available because … we think it is natural to the customer and what the customer wants.

Nokia and Google get together

Two giants are holding hands to put offer their services side-by-side, those being Nokia cellphones, and the Google Search function.

The new Google Search feature will be added to the fresh Nokia phones presented at the Mobile World Congress, and afterwards it will be implemented into the other 40 cellphones that have the search application.

Google search would at first be added to selected phones and markets and later to some mass-market models in more than 100 countries.

Sources: Reuters and NYTimes

Guest post by Tiago of Gadgetizer