
Tesco, UK’s biggest retailer, is in talks with both OD2 and the newly launched Cable & Wireless digital music service for the launch of its own online music service, according to sources. At this point, Tesco still hasn’t decided on who to go with…there seems to be a tussle going on in terms of pricing, licensing, and even taking an equity stake into Tesco’s online venture.
Tesco.com is one of the biggest online retailer in UK market as well, and bought out iVillage UK last year to drive its online efforts…
It seems that the European, especially UK market will increasingly become a competition between these two players…on one hand is the suave Peter Gabriel, with his muscle behind OD2, and its existing white label stores with MSN, Coca-Cola and Tiscali, and on the other hand is the new white label service launched by C&W at Midem.
Even though OD2 has constantly improved its service features, especially with the launch of its new Sonic Selector, it had a potentially embarrassing situation last week, when Coke’s new music site was down for the first 24 hours of its launch…the fault wad OD2’s servers, not Coke, but Coke got all the flack, which of course didn’t make it happy.
Taking a “reliability-sell” approach, with its vast telecoms infrastructure in Europe, C&W can go in for the kill, at least on the backend part…
An interesting battle ahead….
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