SearchEngineJournal.com (www.searchenginejournal.com) announced on November 5 that the software giant Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) expanded its MSN Music Store to eight new countries on November 4. With this expansion the MSN Music Store is now accessible in 17 countries.
According to Microsoft, its new download stores in Spain, the Netherlands, Austria and Switzerland followed an agreement with music download distributor Loudeye (www.loudeye.com). While in Northern Europe Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway the new MSN service will partner with retailer CDON.com (www.CDON.com). Microsoft forecasts that with a larger reach in 4 more countries and growing, along with the popularity of Windows Media Player and MSN, they have a chance to overtake Apple’s music store in the number of songs sold.
Microsoft also hopes that the expansion and hopeful dominance of the MSN Music Store will lead to more downloads of Microsoft Media solutions and also drive more traffic to the MSN Network and MSN Search, which are funded by online advertising.
Microsoft and iTunes are not the only players in the digital download arena, though. Virgin Music and Wal-Mart have launched their own music download search stores while Yahoo recently acquired Music Match and is also still working with Napster. MSN’s Arndt Salzburg said that MSN expects to overtake iTunes very soon because MSN will have a larger user base to tap.
