While video-on-demand has a constant coverage for the continuous release of new projects, from Hulu and iPlayer to the growing number of VoD enabled over-the-top devices, the online music market has been perceived as quite steady during the last few years (with Apple’s iTunes Music Store maintaining a share of over 70%).

Nonetheless, I believe a couple of interesting alternatives have a good chance to gradually increase competition.

1. Napster Music Store

I’ve got a special bond with the Napster brand: it wasn’t only the first peer-to-peer service I bumped into years ago, but also the main topic of my graduation thesis. Everyone probably agrees that it changed forever the way we mean music…

A few months ago, Napster has been relaunched as a legal music store backed by Best Buy. I couldn’t resist: I had to check it out!

Well, for just $5 per month I’ve got not only five DRM-free legal downloads… but also unlimited listening of every song from the catalogue! It’s like merging a traditional store (say Amazon) into the concept of online radio services such as Last.fm or Pandora. Respect to those, Napster has much progress to do in terms of recommendation engine, but grants its users far deeper control: you can select songs or entire albums, put them in a playlist and just listen with no limits.

It’s easy to reckon that the “listening” part comes almost for free (or at $0.05, say), since most songs cost $0.99 on traditional stores.

2. DoubleTwist

I believe part of Apple’s success in the digital music market comes from iTunes, which most iPod users wouldn’t ever replace (well, not even if they could…). Of course iTunes works with its own Music Store only, is based on DRMs and doesn’t manage any devices but the iPods.

Well, now imagine a comparable software which relies on the DRM-free Amazon music store and allows synchronization with nearly every device.

Currently available for Macs only, this all-devices-welcome player (definition borrowed from a Gizmodo article containing also a short video) appears led to a promising evolution.