Microsoft has joined with a British digital music provider to launch the first pan-European service selling songs over the Internet on a pay-as-you-go basis.
The move, made public Thursday, follows the success of Apple's iTunes Music Store and other services in the United States.
London-based On Demand Distribution, or OD2, has the largest catalog of legal digital music in Europe, more than 200,000 tracks from 8,500 artists on all five major labels, plus a slew of independents.
Europeans will be able to download songs starting at 99 cents each — without subscription fees — through the MSN Music Club or Tiscali Music Club using Microsoft's Windows Media Player 9 technology.
While welcoming the increased choice for music lovers, European Union regulators said the news bolsters their antitrust case against the software giant. Just last week, the EU accused Microsoft of trying to squash competing audiovisual software by including its Media Player with the Windows desktop system.
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