Easy does it: Stelios' song shop to trigger price war?

Stelios Haji-Iannou, the entrepreneur behind easyGroup, has announced his music service will be arriving before Christmas.

Stelios' song shop easyMusic will be powered by fellow UK download seller Wippit, with Wippit sourcing the songs and generally providing the nuts and bolts, including DRM (digital rights management).

Users of easyMusic will be able to buy songs from 25p - 4p lower than Wippit's own cheapest songs. easyMusic will also launch with what it calls a 'copyleft' service, where musicians can post their own tunes to the site for easyMusic users to download for free. The copyleft section of the site is still being developed but is scheduled to be up and running within the next couple of months.

Whether the lower-than-average song prices - most online music tracks go for around 79p - will force prices down for easyMusic's competition remains to be seen but it's likely to prove a hit with consumers.

When RealNetworks halved the cost of its newly iPod-compatible songs, it found sales doubled while the temporary promotion ran.

The question of online music pricing hit headlines earlier this week when the Consumers' Association reported Apple's iTunes to the Office of Fair Trading, saying the higher price that UK consumers pay for a track is a breach of European competition law.

While Stelios said at the recent launch of easyMobile that he had only invested "a small sum of money" in the download service, he will be competing against of a number of similar, recently launched rivals.

Along with Napster, MyCokeMusic, Sony Connect and the like, Microsoft recently opened an online song store through its MSN portal.

However, according to a recent report from Forrester Research, there's still a lot of room for expansion in Europeans' taste for online music. The analyst house predicts that sales will grow to €3.5bn by 2009.