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It supports both the permanent download of individual tracks from the HMV Digital Store and a monthly subscription service, HMV Unlimited, to access all the music. Tracks for the former are priced from 59p - undercutting the 79p of iTunes - while the monthly renting of music (which can't be burnt to CD) is £14.99, which is effectively the current market rate).

'Having taken our time to enter this part of the market, our intention is to deliver the best quality service,' said Alan Giles, Chief Executive of the HMV Group. And the company's strategy has four main elements: flexible pricing structures, a focus on album sales (the service has co-operated with publisher's wishes to only make certain music available on an album basis), an emphasis on exclusive material only available through the service (such as tracks of live in-store performances being made available for download only), to maximise the catalogue of music available (1.3 million tracks on start up) and strategic partnerships with the device manufacturers to ensure player compatibility.

A recurring theme from company executives speaking at the launch, however, was the ability for HMV to maximise the advantage of a well-established High street presence in extending its scope into digital music. As well as kiosks for people to sample the service and purchase downloads, staff have been trained to answer queries - a la Carphone Warehouse - and CDs of the software will be given away in the stores along

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with sales of compatible music players.

Speaking of Apple's current dominance Giles declared 'We are the predominant and pre-eminent music specialists, and a plethora of new devices, backed by massive R&D, will change the market.'

The HMV Media Player itself (pictured) is a straightforward music management application, with a tabbed interface covering the main functions - HMV Store, Radio, My Library, Rip, Burn, Sync. Thirty second samples of tracks are made freely available

Note that the service is strictly Microsoft based. The control of access to purchased WMA-format content - the digital rights management (DRM) - is carried out through Windows Media DRM 10. Only devices that are fully compatible with DRM 10 - such as are listed on Microsoft's PlaysForSure.com website - and systems that are running Windows XP SP2 will be able to use the HMV service.

What was not clear, however, was the exact detail of the DRM implementation. Mark Bennett, HMV's Head of Digital, said purchased tracks could be copied to up to three PCs and a particular playlist can be burned to CD seven times. Despite promising these restrictions would be made clear to consumers, minimal details were buried away in the help files, and were somewhat contradictory - a total of five CD copies of a playlist was mentioned, for example.

Only two compatible players will be sold in-store at launch, from Creative and iRiver, but four Philips devices are promised to follow, along with players from Toshiba and Samsung.

The rival service from Virgin - VirginDigital.com - relaunches tomorrow.

Some statistics quoted at the event - cited to Informa - included a projection of the market to be worth £262 million in 2010, a declining iPod market share (from 80 per cent in May 2004 to 64 per cent in June 2005) and that only five per cent of the population have a portable digital music player.

See Music on the move: music downloads and DRM.