Want to buy a pre owned digital download? One careful owner, hardly played…..

Sounds fantastic? It shouldn’t as it’s already here in the States. A new startup called ReDigi has launched in America and is planning to land in Europe early in 2013 offering the ability to sell your pre-owned digital music.

The website has an app which allows you to find the music files on your computer and move them to the Cloud where you can ‘sell, store or stream them’. At the moment it is restricted to PC only (so bad news for Mac owners with iTunes integrated) but potentially good news if you’ve been spending lots on digital music over the last couple of years.

Now whilst this may sound like a good idea and an even better one when you realise that they actually give money to the Artists every time a sale is made through the Artist Syndication Programme, the service is already attracting controversy. Issues are arising over copyright laws and the question of whether you actually ever ‘own’ a digital download. In the US, the firm ReDigi already stands accused of copyright infringement so it will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Meanwhile, we’re not sure how this will work in practice as there are vast numbers of CD’s which have been ripped into iTunes which, even if you could sell the digital version means that you still own the physical product. Or if it only applies to digital files which originated with a download site such as iTunes, will it also apply to files from HMV for example, or Tune Tribe, or 7Digital, Asda, Zavvi, Amazon and so on? And what’s to stop you keeping a copy of the file on an external hard drive somewhere?

Sadly the site doesn’t answer these questions and of course, you can’t sign up for it currently in the UK. We’ll reserve judgement on this for now but keep an eye on this, it could be a way of offloading all your old Abba albums….