iTunes competitors starting to gain notoriety

With its quick rise to dominating the legal music dowloading business, it appears iTunes competitors are starting to draw support. UK-based Bleep.com was recently recognized as UK's best online music store at the annual BT Digital Music Awards.

Founded two years ago by Warp Records, Bleep offers single track and album MP3 downloads, but focuses on independent label indie-rock and electronic music releases, as opposed to the main concentration on top 40 artists and singles associated with iTunes.

Bleep isn't the first pay service to concentrate on independent label music, or the largest. eMusic, founded in 1998, was the first company to sell digital music in MP3 format, and is currently the largest retailer independent music; offering more than 1.4 million tracks from over 4,000 independent labels from a wide variety of genres from reggae to punk, and hardcore to hip hop. They currently contain the catalogs of independent labels such as Epitaph (and all Epitaph imprints), Nitro, Side One Dummy, BYO, Jade Tree and many more.