Microsoft Online Music Store

Microsoft Online Music Store
Microsoft Corp launched a new online store for music downloads on Wednesday, taking direct aim at Apple Computer Inc’s popular iTunes music service.

“They’ re (Microsoft) battling a real powerful brand,” McGuire said, saying that Apple’s end-to-end user experience would be hard to match. Microsoft, for its part, touted its simplified MSN Music interface, with white backgrounds and minimal design elements, which he said allows users to sign up for an account with fewer clicks than iTunes. reuters

MSN Music, which is aimed at luring more users to the world’s largest software maker’s online service, launched in beta, or test mode, offering songs for download at 99 cents each, the same price as Apple’s online store.

Users can access MSN Music from a browser as well as a brand new version of the Windows Media Player that also was unveiled. “We believe we’ve built a better service than the Apple service,” Yusuf Mehdi, MSN vice president, said in an interview. Mehdi said that MSN Music would launch with more than 100,000 songs and grow quickly to more than 1 million. The songs will be encoded in the Windows Media format at a higher bit rate than Apple’s standard format for iTunes, resulting in better sound quality, Mehdi added.

Microsoft, based in Redmond, Washington, had been working to be the first