Tesco have, in recent years, established themselves as the dominant brand in the UK when it comes to supermarkets. They’ve beaten Sainsbury’s and Asda comprehensively year after year. Now it seams Tesco are looking for a new challenge and are spoiling to take on the Internet’s big boys in the shape of Amazon and Apple in the music download arena.

iTunes has for a long time been the place to go to purchase your music online when you don’t want the wait delivery times can bring. Amazon recently started offering a similar service so that customers could download their purchases direct from the website, even whole movies in some cases. Now Tesco wants a piece of market, and it comes along with all of the financial backing and business knowledge it needs.

Tesco knows how to dominate a market.

Tesco has just announced that they will be launching an expanded digital download store that has the potential to take in iTunes. Tesco currently offer musical downloads which are limited in number and are only in the Windows WMA format, meaning they cannot be played back on an iPod.

In their recent press release Tesco said their new service will go live in May and will offer 3,300,000 tracks, and 1,600,000 of those will be DRM free and in the MP3 format. Tesco expects all of the tracks to be DRM free by the end of the year.

Tesco expects the prices of the downloads to be comparable with iTunes, though knowing Tesco it wouldn’t be too much of a surprise to see the prices come in slighter under the iTunes pricing structure.