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Digital
Tesco to close MP3 download store
By CMU Editorial | Published on Friday 24 August 2012
Tesco has announced that it will close its MP3 download store at the end of this month. The news comes just over two months after the company bought a 91% stake in music streaming service We7 for £10.8 million. Indeed, as it announced the news of the download store closure, it was its new purchase that Tesco directed customers towards as an alternative.
Meanwhile, earlier this month Tesco announced that it was piloting a new service in its physical shops called Discs On Demand, which allows shoppers to buy CDs and DVDs featuring music, films and software, manufactured on demand from machines in-store. At the time, the company said that this would “cater to customers who prefer to buy ‘hard copy’ CDs and DVDs, complementing Tesco’s digital film and music offerings through [movie streaming service] blinkbox and We7”.
This latest move suggests that, back online, Tesco sees the access model, rather than ownership, as the ultimate future of digital content consumption. Or at least that it feels unable to compete with the big players in the music download space, Apple and Amazon.
