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HMV Digital Review
- HMV Digital is only in the UK so the prices quoted here are in British pounds
- HMV offers a subscription service or a pay as you download store
- The download store offers music at the following prices
- Individual songs - £0.69
- Albums - Vary depending on title but we found lots of new releases at £6.99
- The subscription service costs £5.99 per month for unlimited streaming
- Download tracks for as little as £0.69
- Free download manager software
- Compatible only with PC and Internet Explorer
- Stream unlimited tracks with hmv.Jukebox
- Over 4 million tracks in the music library
- Music from bands on major labels
- MP3 downloads encoded at least at 320
kbps
- High quality downloads at 256 or 320 kbps
- Download tracks DRM free
- Burn to an unlimited number of CDs
- Copy to an unlimited number of portable devices
- Submit user reviews of any music
- Wide range of spoken word and comedy downloads
- Regular special offers
- Only available in the UK
HMVDigital is the online arm of the huge UK based music retailer. As such you can expect a huge music library to choose from, which is constantly updated with the latest tunes. The service is only available in the UK at the moment so those at the other side of the pond may have to look elsewhere.
HMV has a huge high street presence in the UK and have extended this to the digital world. The downloads web site integrates with the main HMV online store and you must sign up for a free account before being allowed to purchase anything. You can expect the full neon pink branding everywhere, but the site is still surprisingly easy to use and elegantly designed. There is, of course, the usual cross promotion you can expect from an online retailer trying to push other products on you as you do your downloading, but it isn't as bad as some sites we have seen.
The music library HMV offers is huge, and at over 4 million tracks rivals even the big boys like iTunes and Napster. You can download them or stream them depending on what you want to pay, but either way you will have to be running Internet Explorer on a PC - and a version no earlier than 7. Deciding not to support Firefox was a bit disappointing from such a major company, but they assure that a solution is in the pipeline.
The reason no other browsers are supported is because HMV requires you to use their ActiveX based download manager software which runs through a browser. It's pretty standard stuff, and something that other services manage to offer across a range of web browsers so we don't see why HMV shouldn't.
Regarding Digital Rights Management (DRM):
the subscription based service allows you to stream tracks from the music library using your PC. You don't get to download the tracks so you can't use them on a portable player or burn them to CD. It goes without saying that you must also be connected to the internet.
Tracks downloaded from the digital store are all MP3 format and encoded at 320 kbps minimum - sometimes even as high as 510 kbps. This provides really high quality sound, but does increase the file size slightly. All MP3s are DRM free and can be copied to any number of portable players or burned to any number of CDs.
What about value for money? Well, the subscription service costs £5.99 per month and allows you to stream as many tracks as you like. The only shortcoming is that you can't use them on your portable player or an offline PC.
Individual songs from the download store usually come in at £0.69, which is 10p lower than a lot of online music providers. Albums are also good value and most new releases can be found for as little a £6.99. It depends on the title though, and sometimes artists' back catalogues can be more expensive than the latest releases.
In all, HMV offers a pretty good service for digital music lovers. We reckon you would be better off somewhere else if you are looking for a subscription service, but if you are based in the UK and looking to download music to keep, you can't go too far wrong with HMV Digital.
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