Australia's leading CD and DVD retailer, Sanity Entertainment is waging all out war with Apple's iTunes by launching it's own music subscription service.

Australia's leading CD and DVD retailer, Sanity Entertainment is waging all out war with Apple's iTunes by launching it's own music subscription service.

With every major record label's entire digital catalogue at the customer's disposal, it's a fairly big move for this relatively small company.

Along with rivalling their collection, the Loadit music store as it's called, is also undercutting iTunes' prices by massive amounts. For about €20 a month you can download as many as 300 songs to three registered computers and two MP3 players. That works out at about 7c a track compared to iTune's 99c.

Tony Quinn who manages Loadit Ltd is pretty confident it'll catch on "If this proposition is presented to the customer in a way that makes sense, they'll take it on," Quinn said. "The solution will come through education at retail. [Consumers] understand the concept of [subscribing to] pay TV and magazines, so why not for music?"

And if it does catch on, Sanity are ready to offer the service through kiosks at their retail stores and have also signed a deal with Fujifilm to offer the service at pver 6000 digital photo printing machines all over Australia.

Also on their side are the Bill Gates and the boys and girls at Windows. Loadit will be standard on the Windows Media Player 11 ensuring the company millions of potential customers. However, it's not all great news as the service will not be offered to those of us reading this on a Mac. Restrictions on the technology mean it's unavailable to Mac and iPod users. Somehow I don't think anyone over at Apple HQ will be getting too worried just yet!

For more news