This morning saw the launch of Tower Records new digital music store. It's not exactly an earth shaking offer, but Tower claims a deeper catalog than many other digital music retailers.

Offering files protected by Microsoft's PlaysForSure DRM, which can only be played back on selected digital music players and Windows XP computers (no Mac, Linux or Windows 2000 love to be had) Tower hopes to use the store in cross promotional efforts, offering brick and mortar customers free downloads with purchase of physical CDs.

Tower executives I spoke with pointed to the store's "high quality" offerings, encoded at 192kbps and Tower's domain experience selling to music connoisseurs as the differentiating characteristic against a sea of other digital retailers.

I question the logic of selling mid-quality files to caviar customers. True, many audiophiles have shunned compressed digital formats for the quality loss and audible artifacts left behind by the compression process. However, it is unlikely that many hard core music fans will be swayed by the marginal difference 192kbs quality encoding offers (as opposed to 128kbps files offered other places).

With Tower suffering in the brick and mortar space, and struggling to resolve indie cred with corporate sensibility, it's quite a shame that this is all the could muster. The new Tower Digital is a lackluster offer from a company who, at one time, knew how to do it better.