Best Buy Launches Digital Music Store – Why?

By Shan Sadiq ● Oct 6, 2006

Best Buy has partnered with Real Networks’ Rhapsody and SanDisk to launch a digital music store. It will also start selling the SanDisk Sansa e200R Rhapsody digital music player which will play songs downloaded through its music store.

Best Buy plans to compete with Apple’s iTunes and Microsoft’s Zune through this new service. It also plans to make sure its employees promote the service to customers.

It looks like Best Buy will charge $14.99 a month for a subscription service and .99 cents for single track downloads. I for one do not think we need another retail digital music store. This has failure written all over it.

Best buy will essentially be competing with itself because it already carries a line of Apple iPods and will carry the Microsoft Zune which comes out this holiday season.

I am not sure how Apple or Microsoft, who have their own digital music stores, feel about this move. I think that Best Buy needs to stick to what it does best: sell electronics. Going into the digital music business is bad news for a retailer. This service will most likely fail before it ever gains any traction.