Swedish online music store no hit yet - speculations that Apple will not open iTunes store in Sweden

Telecomworldwire, Oct 14, 2004

TELECOMWORLDWIRE-14 October 2004-Swedish online music store no hit yet - speculations that Apple will not open iTunes store in Sweden(C)1994-2004 M2 COMMUNICATIONS LTD http://www.m2.com

Apple may skip Sweden again when extending the services of its online music store iTunes Music Store in October.

The plans include a European expansion this month, but no information has yet been disclosed on what countries may be included in the plans. The current European iTunes music stores are located in the UK, France and Germany in addition to the music store in the USA.

According to the Swedish technology newspaper Ny Teknik, speculations are that Sweden will not be included as Apple appears not to have launched any negotiations with Swedish businesses for access to local artists.

Separately, Poplife, an online music store by Inprodicon, has seen no immediate success. The company launched stores located with eight customers in June and the estimate is that the stores may have sold a total of 200,000 songs by the end of the year.

Inprodicon has reportedly said that the sales are going according to plans with low volumes at first. Apparently, Peter Holmlund, responsible for the Poplife store at the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, is not impressed. According to Holmlund, the price for the CD "The Essential Clash" is SEK569.90 for a download while the double CD only costs SEK149 in the average store. He attributes this to the fact that there are major record companies controlling the prices in the Poplife stores.

According to Ny Teknik, the low usage of the stores may also be dependent on the fact that the use the file format WMA, while Apple uses mp3 and AAC for its iPod music player, raising the question of preferred formats of buyers.

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