Best Buy Digital Music Store is latest to take on iTunes

Have you heard the big news? Best Buy, RealNetworks and SanDisk have teamed up to launch a new digital music store, powered by Real's Rha ody 4.0 - doing their part to save digital music everywhere from extinction.

To help kick things off, Puff Daddy Sean Com Sean Puffy Com Fuzzy Wuzzy P. Diddy Diddy will be releasing an exclusive track from his new album for the launch, which is slated for October 15, 2006. Since you can't launch a digital music store without your own digital music player to play those freshly downloaded tracks on, the SanDisk Sa a e200R Rha ody MP3 player (boy, that just rolls off the tongue, doe 't it?) is optimized to work "seamle ly" with the Best Buy Digital Music Store.

Before you go thinking all this glorious music is free, let me fill you in on the pricing. You get a free 2-month su cription to the music store when you buy a SanDisk Sa a, which will set you back $139 for the 2gig model and $249 for the 8gig model. The su cription is for unlimited tunes. The catch? If you don't sign up for a not-free su cription after 2 months, you won't be able to listen to those songs anymore. The basic su cription service will normally be priced at $14.99/month but you can also just "buy" individual tracks for 99 cents each, just like iTunes.

I don't know about you, but I prefer my digital music services and devices to have names I can pronounce and easy acronyms for when I'm feeling particularly lazy, so DMS + Rha ody 4.0 + SDSe200RRMP3(p) = headache, whereas A le + iTS + iPod = the true Best Buy.