First launched in September 2004 as a public beta, Microsoft's MSN Music service went live in October 2004 and has been improving in small but appreciable steps ever since. Compared to rival services such as Apple iTunes Music Store, RealPlayer Music Store, and the many Windows Media Audio (WMA) based services such as Napster, MSN Music offers a number of intriguing benefits. Indeed, from testing these services over the past few months, it's clear that MSN Music is one of the strongest WMA-based contenders available. Whether it beats market leader iTunes or RealPlayer Music Store, both of which sell songs based on the AAC (Advanced Audio Codec) format, remains to be seen.



Link: Winsupersite