Comment 27 for bug 528910

As I understand it, 7digital sells encoded files as provided by the record company (or other digital music agents) and the provider of those songs has to sign them as "ok".

Maybe because they want to avoid lawsuits in case a song accidentally has weird random encoding artifacts and because of that doesn't sell well or gives the artist a bad reputation... ;)

If you read the FAQ I linked to before, you will see that 7digital also has some .wma tracks in their catalogue (which will be filtered out of the Ubuntu store!), so I'm sure 7digital can cope with multiple formats in their backend, and the presence of .ogg or .flac is most likely (also) dependent on buy-in from the music suppliers...

@rags: it's not entirely exact to say that Canonical is not big enough a company to ask for vorbis-encoded tracks, as the size of Canonical is not really relevant here, but it probably is not powerful enough yet to convince the big companies; they will first have to prove they bring in a lot of customers...