Microsoft Unveils 'Urge' Music Service 582
CHaN_316 writes "CNNMoney has an article entitled, 'Gates unveils his Urge.' From the piece: 'Bill Gates aims to take over your living room and late Wednesday he unveiled a new music service and new software to do it. Using an appearance with Justin Timberlake, the Microsoft chairman debuted a new music service, Urge, to directly compete with the iTunes music store and interface. Urge launches with over 2 million tracks for purchase or as part of an all-you-can eat subscription, an option the iTunes music store doesn't have. The offering will include exclusive material from MTV.' Begin the living room wars we must." Confirmation of an earlier story on this topic.
Give us what we went, not what you want to give us (Score:5, Insightful)
When will somebody notice that with a sentance that include the words
in a story about a online music shop, that all this DRM is really just shooting themselves in the foot! If it doesn't work on a iPod will it not work on a RIO either? how about a sony walkman? Maybe I should download a copy for free and at a higher bit rate from the internet?
Why would i want to buy/rent music that i can't even listen to?
DRM (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyway, I imagine this service is much like Napster in its all-you-can-eat mode; all the music you can download, until you stop paying, and then all the music stops playing. While I could easily strip the DRM off the WMA files (assuming they use a current-gen version of WMA, which we don't know), that would take too much effort on my part to make it worth the money.
Message to Microsoft: If you want to attract people who are currently downloading their music for free elsewhere, you have to offer more than what other music stores offer. Let people who download music through the subscription service (with perhaps a decent per-month limit, say, 100 tracks, to keep people from trying to download the entire database) keep their music when their subscription ends. Otherwise, the service has no value to me, because I know later on I'll get tired of downloading music for a while, and quit paying for the privilege to do so; that doesn't mean I want my entire music collection that I've already paid for to stop working.
I'd also recommend using non-DRM MP3, but hey, this is Microsoft we're talking about. Can't expect everything...
They couldn't think of an uglier name (Score:2, Insightful)
Whoever comes up with this kind of product names at MS has to be fired.
Now let those Bill Gates "urge" jokes roll.
Re:Give us what we went, not what you want to give (Score:1, Insightful)
BTW, do you not think that songs purchased from iTMS have DRM in them? Why do you think it's so difficult to transfer them to another computer?
It won't work (Score:3, Insightful)
Bingo (Score:4, Insightful)
Throw in "50 cent" and we're all set.
Re:Give us what we went, not what you want to give (Score:3, Insightful)
Digital Sign the music you download so it can be tracked back to you if you swap it, and have a updating list on your PC (updated through Windows Update) that stops banned/illegal copied music from being played?
Or come up with a DRM that will work everywhere! It's not that i mind DRM, it's that is stops me from using music the way I want to use music.
Re:Give us what we went, not what you want to give (Score:5, Insightful)
Just look at the ODF spectical. Independant researchers and archivists have been chiming in saying MSFT format is horrible. MSFT could easily support ODF. MSFT could easily support W3C standards. MSFT could of been smart and killed ActiveX years ago preventing the majoity of the viruses currently in existance.
It's MSFT's way or the highway. Now Napster and Real have all but begged for apple to open up Fairplay. And Apple should of done that by now. But in the end Apple is just as bad as MSFT when it comes to those ideas.
of course I still own a powerbook and have no working windows machines in my presence any more.
Re:It won't work (Score:3, Insightful)
But do savvy people use Microsoft products?
Re:Give us what we went, not what you want to give (Score:3, Insightful)
You guarantee that do you? (Is that you Bill?)
Microsoft doesn't license anything - they developed wmv rather then licensing quicktime and so on.
It is simply not in their nature to pay royalties to another company - especially Apple who've been a thorn in their side all these years.
I suspect Microsoft are waiting to see what happens Real's Harmony [appleinsider.com] before embracing and extending fairplay.
Re:Give us what we went, not what you want to give (Score:3, Insightful)
Right now, I can move my MP3 music like so: Copying it across the network. Said feat takes approximately five seconds per MP3.
So why should I be using these stores again?
Re:Give us what we went, not what you want to give (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Give us what we went, not what you want to give (Score:5, Insightful)
The solution is simply to avoid DRM altogether. DRM is fundamentally flawed and will always be broken, because in the end, I have your music on my hard drive, and you're not going to be able to stop me from doing what I want with it.
Re:Give us what we went, not what you want to give (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft stockholders???? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Give us what we went, not what you want to give (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Give us what we went, not what you want to give (Score:5, Insightful)
I see how Apple wins these things... (Score:4, Insightful)
Steve announces these things and you can buy one immediately. If it's software, you can download it/buy it today.
I think the slow lumbering of MS will make this product as much of an also ran as every other competing service to itunes. Tying themselves to MTV is supposed to appeal to a younger demographic, but what teenager associates MTV with music? Unless they're awake at 2:30 am on a Tuesday, they've never seen MTV air a music video. What older person does? VH1 coulda been a better fit than this.
Re:DRM (Score:3, Insightful)
CDs, records... music on a physical medium have resale value. Should your taste in music change, you can sell your old stuff to fund your new collection. And don't get me started on old, out of production LPs.
There's also a fair amount of value in being able to control your music. I'm fairly certain that Urge won't be compatible with Linux (Maybe if DVD Jon takes an interest in it....) or Mac. There will likely be restrictions on burning your music to audio CD and which portable players it will play in, unlike CDs which can generally be ripped to play on anything.
No, I believe that there's a great value in owning a physical representation of your music. $0.99 per track (per the iTunes model) is almost ok with me given that I can burn the tracks to a CD and use DeDRMs if I want to play it elsewhere. The buffet model ala Napster 2.0 does not allow you to burn tracks (unless you pay the "purchase" fee for each track you wish to burn--double dipping!). I assume Urge will be the same way.
Re:Give us what we went, not what you want to give (Score:2, Insightful)
So they did try asking...
To little, to late (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Smart move (Score:3, Insightful)
But most people don't understand the subscription model and, when they do, they're hostile to it. People don't want to pay money month after month for music.
"Plays for Sure" will never give MS an upper hand over Apple. Consumers don't much care if their music is WMA or AAC; what they want is cool, easy-to-use software and hardware. Apple has this cornered. No other device comes remotely close to iPod, and Apple cemented this lead when they released Nano. The companies making WMA players, like Creative, are coming out with some pretty sorry hardware. It's heavy, boxy, and very unstylish. Creative came close with that Zen Micro, but then Apple whipped them again with Nano.
What MS needs to do is use those billions to come up with a really good portable player. Or, use those billions to fund and subsidize hardware makers who come up with good players, the same way Intel subsidizes PC makers. As long as all the WMA hardware is rotten, WMA and "Plays for Sure" are going nowhere, even with rental music.
Re:Smart move (Score:1, Insightful)
Apple may not be sinless, but that's a bad example. Sure Apple changed the condition, but you can register 5 computers (was 3) now in exchange for the lower number of times an unchanged playlist can be burned. Yes, playlist and not tracks. That is, the tracks still can be burned unlimitedly. But who really needs more than a couple of copies of a playlist? Besides, you can:
1. Duplicate the resulting CD without using iTunes.
2. Copy the playlist, delete the original and get a new set of burn times.
3. Change the order of a couple songs and get a new set of burn times.
And as for Apple succumbing to RIAA, I guess that's why Apple refused to labels' demand for varying prices and called music labels greedy if they wanted to change it.
Microsoft really HAS to win this one... (Score:2, Insightful)
Not that I either expect them to, or want them to, but if they can't win on this, they're going to be in serious trouble. After the total failour of the XBox 360 launch (quite possibly the weakest launch of any major console in terms of "trend setting"), and a pretty dismal year for their shareholders, noone's going to take them seriously in new, younger markets anymore. In other news, their market share is slipping (slowly, but still on a negative trend), and national headlines (NBC nightly news) were made yesterday when serious flaws in windows security were discovered. They're currently losing the HD media wars badly. They're on the cusp of losing all their major upcoming battles, and with all the money they have, you'd think they'd find a quick way of bailing themselves out, but I think MS have really bitten off more than they can chew. Sure, they'll get a chunk of change from "Vista", later this year, but that's only because they've got one market locked in, their break-in power to new markets, on the other hand, has been pretty bad as of late.
They're not going to have as easy a time killing off iTunes as they did Netscape. They got IE in the door because of large businesses with a "no touch" attitude towards new installs on their computers, so they'd stick to the pre-installed IE. Their main demographic in THIS battle, however, is a highly capable, No Fear, computer savvy youth who previously had the RIAA worried by their increased downloads of illegal music from virtually no-named services. This isn't the same crowd with the, "if it's not broke, don't fix it", this is a demographic that's not afraid to go out of their way to get what they want. So, this time, they're really going to have to compete in terms of style and trend, something they've never been good at. Their first move seems pretty clueless to me: hire on a former music content provider (MTV), which is currently regarded by today's youth as being "so yesterday"; for you're spokesman, get on board a washed up teen idol who may have hit it big with 14 year old girls in 1998, but who's name is going to insite a resounding "Justin who?" response from the same demographic today. I mean, Justin Timberlake coule be Dick Clark for all they care—yes, pop culture moves THAT FAST. And for the grand finale, name your service, as someone said, something associated with gross bodily function. Seriously, my first reaction to the name was "ewww", it conjure's up images of some guy badly needing to take a dump. This reminds me of a funny scene from a commedy a few years back, "Nothing to Lose", in which the main character, a marketting specialist, warns one of his clients, "Excriment is the last thing people are going to want to think about when buying cookies", I think this holds true in this case too. Apple captured millions with sillohette's dancing around with iPods, how popular would they have been if the sillohette's were holding their crotches, swaying back and forth saying, "I need to pee"?
Re:Christian rock (Score:4, Insightful)
Good rock is good rock, and Stryper and Creed would suck no matter what their message.
Re:Give us what we went, not what you want to give (Score:3, Insightful)
While I do think they are on bad drugs, I don't think the philosophy is so cracked. It's just playing out differently this time.
When Apple started to have huge success with the iPod, all the naysayers came out of the woodwork and (rightly) pointed out that this very strategy - keep it proprietary and lock it down as best you can - totally backfired on Apple before, in the desktop PC area. Microsoft capitalized (to say the least) on the 'open ecosystem' of PC parts that were more-or-less interchangeable, and that came to rule the market. So for MS to say, let's let all the digital audio player manufacturers chip away at Apple until they are marginal again, and we will concentrate on being the software that powers all these music transactions... it really wasn't such a crazy thought.
Except this time, for whatever reason, it is actually working for Apple. So they are stymied. MS, Creative et. al fully believed that the iPod's market domination would surely have slipped by now. The iPod has been out for several years now. But it really hasn't.
Having said all that, I am convinced Apple is too smart to make the same bad decision (I mean books have been written about that decision!) this time around. They just haven't felt the pressure yet, so they have no motivation to do so. If iPod sales slip below a magic number of saturation, say 40%, Apple WILL open Fairplay and go from there. And everyone but MS will praise them for it. I did like the "all you can eat" idea, though. The real question is "If I unsubsrcibe to the service, does every song in my collection just disappear?" If the answer is "yes" then my answer is "no thanks."
That is exactly what happens. You get maybe a month's worth of grace period, then... poof. Welcome to Janus, your two-faced media guardian.
Re:Look at the sales numbers... (Score:4, Insightful)
So, would you rather sell 10 million units of something at a loss or 2 million with a profit?
Re:Urge to... (Score:4, Insightful)
I didn't RTFA, but I'm guessing they're going with DRMed WMA files. Does anyone actually use WMA besides Napster and Microsoft? I have a lot of idiot friends who don't know how to use computers and they ripped their CD collections into WMA because it was default encoder in MediaPlayer. As soon as they bought iPods, they had to re-rip their CD collections as MP3.
Re:Smart move (Score:5, Insightful)
Subscription-based music is the way to go.
Gee, really? I guess that explains why none of them are doing very well then and why analyst after analyst has found that people want to own, not rent music.
I've found it is definitely worth the $60/year. Right now I've got 744 songs in my collection, which if purchased at iTunes would cost more than 12 years of subscription fees (assuming the price doesn't go up).
So how many songs do you think you will download, versus how long do you think you will live? I spend under $60 on used CDs and music downloads a year. Plus, I don't ever have to worry about whether or not I will get enough any given year. It stays forever. Finally, there is no danger that someone will go out of business and my CDs or downloads (which I burn to CD) will go out of business. You're betting that in 30 years Yahoo music service will still be around and carrying music you like, otherwise your investment is wasted. That's a lot of commitment to one service. I have some friends who are looking for a good man, would you like me to forward some marriage proposals to them for you?
Seriously though, I hope it works out for you, and nothing is wrong with choice, it just isn't a choice many consumers seem to want, according to most market evaluations.
Re:Smart move (Score:3, Insightful)
I know it's the biggest trend in business right now; recurring revenue and all that, but some things just shouldn't be subscriptions and a downloadable music service is one of them. And by "shouldn't be" I mean the consumer is generally getting shafted.
If I pay for music I expect to do whatever the hell I want with it (aside from sharing freely to the world or selling it; which I don't expect).
I won't pay to continue to have access something that I can purchase once and have forever.
I won't pay to lose all control over access to something I'm currently capable of controlling (like my music (mp3) collection). That's insane.
The only reason I still bother to buy CDs is I like to rip them to mp3 at my own exacting specifications. I don't listen to them direct from CD anymore - ever.
A downloadable subscription service (such as this one) would:
Encumber me with DRM and all the PITA that entails.
Remove my control over the quality of my music.
Remove my control over the ID3 tagging of my music.
Restrict my ability to play my music wherever or on whatever I damn well please.
If I pay for music I expect to own it. Plain and simple.