Steve writes that the msn music store beta has opened. About time too, but as usual it's region limited. Now I realise why, after spending a long time working with digital music and video getting two labels owned by the same company to agree on anything is hard enough, without trying to get multiple labels, across multiple countries to agree. iTunes discovered this and now Microsoft have. It still leaves me without a decent WMA based music store in the UK.

The current msn.co.uk store, a branded OD2 store is old, ugly, lacking in the content I want and the billing is awful. I have to pay a minimum amount, which is a lot more than the price of a single track. The credit then sits there. Forever. Nice, take a large amount (compared to the individual track price) of money and who cares if the customer comes back, we have their cash anyway. Good business model. Add to this the low quality bitrate of the music, the differing rules between labels (some will allow transfers to portable devices, different numbers of burns and so on) and the UK offering is simply bad.

The new US store comes along as Windows Media Player gets updated to version 10. As an added bonus for UK users the new media player removes the plug-ins that the UK store uses to present itself in the player, leaving Napster and CinemaNow. Of course CinemaNow is US only and the Napster store linked to is the US store. Lets not get started on Napster's subscription model. So now I have to fire up the browser and try to remember the store URL because the msn uk site has it hidden away, and drilling down into Entertainment, then Music, then Downloads isn't exactly marketing it to the best effect. Of course the store URL, http://sib1.od2.com/common/Framework.aspx?shid=0170002E isn't useful either.

So the question is how long will the UK wait to see the new msn music store?