tunecheckerSome of our UK readers may already be aware of Martin Lewis – he runs a consumer advocate website called moneysavingexpert.com [prepare your eyeballs for a 90’s throwback website] that details all kind of cheap offers on high street products and financial services. Despite the lack of their front end aesthetic, his web developers have clearly got some savvy, as they’ve built a site called TuneChecker that collects price information from a range of online music download stores – Amazon, iTunes, Orange, Tesco etc. and delivers you a comparison. Clicks through their site that end up in a purchase will then be feeding an affiliate percentage back to Mr. Lewis and co. Happily for our digital distribution customers, Amazon and iTunes come out on top most frequently, so it can only help RouteNote artist’s sales.

For the music buying public, this exposes the sometimes eyebrow-raisingly large price differences between stores (Orange are almost 2x the price of Amazon in our example), and will have a balancing effect on the price of a download album – which is what their main website is all about.