To Scott Bahneman, the 43-year-old founder of fledgling digital music service MusicGiants, this much is clear: He's not out to slay the Apple digital music dragon.

Steve Jobs and Co. have the dominant portable music player and download store on the market--no one's even close--but Bahnemann says Jobs can have the mainstream digital music fan.

MusicGiants is after the "uberphile," he said.

"They don't buy regular [gas], and they don't buy mid-grade, they buy premium, because they have a sports car and they want to get the absolute best performance out of it," he says of his target customers. "We effectively sell premium music for high-performance audio gear."

In this case, premium isn't that much more expensive than regular. MusicGiants charges $1.29 per song for its high-fidelity downloads--think 1100kbps instead of Apple's 192kbps--just a short jump from the 99-cent-per-song price tag established by iTunes.

Lake Tahoe area-based MusicGiants launched its digital download service in late September, and although they're tight-lipped about how many customers they have so far, Bahneman said he's comfortable with MusicGiants' niche target audience.

"From the beginning, we felt that the high-fidelity market was where we wanted to be," he said. "Frankly, iTunes didn't really have much of an impact on us and it doesn't today. iTunes is a great solution for portable music today, but we're really focused on home audio, and the sound quality in portable music just isn't where it needs to be for home audio."

"The uberphiles of the world are the folks that have a really nice stereo in their home and would love to have some really nice content to play on it --that is a huge market," he continued, noting that industry research indicates that 35 million households have a stereo receiver with 5.1 surround sound capability.

But in a digital music landscape dominated by portable music--iTunes and iPod each command about 80 percent of their respective markets--that could be a tough sell.

"The problem is that the mass market is where the real numbers are," Jupiter Research analyst Michael Gartenberg said. "The consumer has already spoken that they are perfectly happy to have music below CD quality from places like iTunes. Quality is not the battlefront at this moment in time for consumers."

Bahneman says MusicGiants is in it for the long haul, and he's got a unique marketing ploy to prove it. Instead of mass market ad campaigns from mainstream plays like Napster and Rhapsody, MusicGiants is promoting its service through audio equipment resellers, who can help shorten the learning curve for consumers about Windows Media's "lossless"--meaning noncompressed--audio formats.

Resellers who market the MusicGiants service to customers in their homes get recurring revenue for every song the customer downloads. The company calls the program "Party Like a Rock Star," because for every Rolling Stones song downloaded, for instance, "Mick Jagger gets a check, Keith Richards gets a check, and the reseller gets a check," Bahneman said.

"We're just really not after the mass market," he said. "Because we're a niche player, we're approaching it the way Rolls Royce might do it--very selectively."

Gartenberg said MusicGiants has its work cut out for it.

"Consumers are saying that good enough is good enough," he said. "That combined with the fact that the dominant device on the market doesn't work with it presents a huge challenge for the company."

MusicGiants has signed licensing deals with all four major record labels, with a heavy focus on content that appeals to its high-income demographic, including classic rock, jazz, and classical.

Bahneman said he's prepared to wait out the portable-music craze. He previously owned a company called Bank Card that moved credit card transactions into the digital age. That process took five to seven years, he said, the same amount of time he expects for the digital music space to move towards high-fidelity downloads.

"It's a marathon, not a sprint, and if you're not in it for the long haul, then it's not for you," he said.