Play.com yesterday beat Amazon to become the first big online entertainment retailer in Britain to offer unrestricted digital music downloads.

The Jersey-based group is seeking to challenge the dominance of Apple with its PlayDigital service, which offers 1.3 million tracks free of the digital rights management (DRM) technology that limits the devices on which legitimately downloaded tracks can be played.

Apple, which has a 70 per cent share of the online music market in the UK, has used DRM to lock consumers into its iPod players. Its iTunes service offers only a small chunk of tracks DRM-free.

Play.com also boasted of being better value than Apple’s iTunes music store, with its top 100 tracks available at 65p, compared with 79p on iTunes. Other singles cost 70p and the most popular albums will cost £6.99, against iTunes’s £7.99.

Amazon, Play.com’s key rival, has launched a DRM-free digital music store in the United States, but has yet to offer one in Britain.

Play.com has secured only EMI and independent players for the service so far. However, it is optimistic about securing other significant tie-ups within six months, it said.

Dan Cryan, a digital music analyst for Screen Digest, said that while Play.com had scored a coup in beating Amazon to market, he was sceptical about the service’s chances of achieving success.

“The online music market has long been a hardware market, which is to say an iPod-driven market, and breaking into that is going to be challenging for Play,” Mr Cryan said.

A key advantage for Apple, he said, was the seamless process in downloading tracks from the iTunes store to an iPod. ITunes is also preparing to bring down its prices after the European Commission forced Apple to bring its British prices in line with its prices in the rest of Europe.

Other businesses offering a DRM-free service in the UK include 7digital and eMusic, the subscription service.

Mark Mulligan, from Jupiter Research, said that the Play.com service showed that “new entrants into the digital music space are banking that digital rights management is not going to be around”.

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