In a move no doubt to spur sluggish retail sales, Tower Records has created Tower Records digital powered by puretracks.

All of the music is in Microsoft’s Windows Media Audio format, encoded at a higher bit rate than most other online stores to provide better audio fidelity … This format can be burned to disc and played on many existing CD players. It also can be moved to most digital music players, with the exception of Apple’s iPod.

I’ll have to stop by the Tower store in Tacoma (if it’s still there, of course), to see how they are implementing this inside the stores, but any newcomer throwing the bestselling iPod to the curb by choosing WMP format is going to find it slim pickins with all the competition to be successful. Seems like if one were designing a store, they’d be wisest to offer MP3 (and at the lowest price possible), which is a format both Apple and Windows support natively. Yeah, I know, no DRM. That’s the downside from the music companies perspective, but ask any music consumer what format they like best and chances are MP3 will be the answer. MP3 I can play in our car stereo. All other formats require some sort of converter or special player (a few high end exceptions).

I guess for Mac users there’s always Flip4Mac, but does that work with DRM’d files?

Good luck Tower, this move seems way too little, way too late.