No, not legally, at least not to my knowledge. Yesterday the german electronic discounter Saturn opened its newest store in Klagenfurt. Naturally I was there to see, what special offers they had. I was quite suprised, when I saw quite a bunch of more or less new CDs at a price of 7.99EUR. For example the current Korn album (with copy protection :-? ) was available for 7.99EUR. Today I got some adverticing from Cosmos (an austrian discounter) offering every Pink album (except the new one) for the same price. With prices like these, offline-stores could finally gain some ground against the online-music-stores at least for me, esp. since iTunes seems to have lifted some of their own pricing guidelines and now offers albums for more than the normal 9.99EUR which is quite disappointing in my opinion. But until most of the albums out there are available for 9.99EUR or less in stores like Saturn or Cosmos, shops like iTunes won’t lose me as a customer, unless they implement “unfair” DRM systems. It’s still quite an interesting development, since until a few months ago, the so called “special offers” in those stores had a price of 13.99EUR (or 9.99EUR in some really really rare cases).
Offline-stores trying to battle online music stores?
Horst Gutmann, software engineer from Graz, Austria.
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