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MTV Getting into Music Download Business
Pranjal writes "According to this article at Economic Times, MTV is getting into the music download business. MTV chief Tom Freston announced on Monday, the service would debut within the first half of next year. Looks like the online music download business is heating up."
Witness the fad of the 2000's - online music services.
You know which one will survive? The one the RIAA sets up for themselves.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I learned two things:
- MTV's music download service will "compete with iTunes and everyone else"
AND
- "MTV will also be competing with a relaunched Napster and recently launched BuyMusic.com"
Wait, make that three things: there's no way to get back the five minutes I spent reading that article.
1. Have mp3s to download not wma rubbish
2. Be cheap
3. Let people in the UK use it please!
4. Have a mix
5. Dont just market it at helpless teeny boppers
6. Please, pretty please
Electronic transmission of text has been easilly available for several decades now, yet people still buy stacks of paper with words printed on them.
As long as owning an album one a removable storage media means actually owning that copy, people like me will pay for it when the music is good enough to be worth buying.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
There's a major difference between music and text, however - people greatly prefer reading newspapers or books because of portability, legibility, etc. By comparison, there is little or no difference between listening to a music CD and music stored in some other medium like a HD or Flash card. Once they resolve the licensing issues this will become a no-brainer. It sounds like iTunes is making good progress on that front...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Wait...did you just ask for MTV to NOT pander to helpless teeny boppers? Dude, that's their market!
Here's why: the iPod.
The iPod has serious street cred (and market share) amongst MTV-watching teens. For MTV to make their service acceptable to the record companies, it will have to have ham-handed, crippling DRM. For MTV to make their service successful, they'll have to make it work with the iPod, arguably the most popular/cool MP3 player amongst their viewers (I mean, OMG, 50 Cent had one in his video!!!)
Without both sides of that above equation in place, the service will be a failure right out of the gate. And with the iTMS now available for Windows, it's not in Apple's interest to assist a third-party music service by making the iPod work with it. People will have a more seamless experience with their iPods if they just stick with the iTMS, and Apple will make a few more bucks out of it that way.
So, the MTV online music service is analogous to a racehorse that drops dead while being walked to the starting gate.
~Philly
With all these services cropping up, I'm beginning to wonder about the limits of the interoperability (and longevity) of the formats used for the files I buy (rent?).
I can go out to any CD store, and I can bring my CD home and listen to it in any CD player from any company. This will remain true long after CD is supplanted by the Next Big Thing (TM). It's not difficult to find a record player, although they're not as omnipresent as they once were. It takes a little more work, but I can find someone to sell me an 8-track player or a reel-to-reel, too. Worst case, I can build one with the right components and little know-how (that I don't happen to have).
When I buy a song from Itunes, its in a proprietary format I can only read with apple's products. That's fine for now (they're great products), but what am I going to do 10 years down the line if Apple gets out of the music business. The selection is a little more flexible on the WMA-based music side, as Microsoft is licensing the format and its DRM to anyone and everyone, but ultimately, you can run into a lesser version of the same problem.
I don't want to have to install 10 different proprietary music players and buy 10 different portable devices just to shop from 10 different online stores. And I don't want my purchases to become useless just because a company goes out of business or drops its music player/sales line - or because I switch operating systems or even upgrade to a new OS revision that isn't supported.
For now, I'll stick with ripping my own CDs to unprotected MP3s (sorry OGG, I have a nomad). I'll reconsider once (if) everyone settles on a defacto standard for a format that's not too restrictive to but useful.
Anyways, just look how the napster craze hit music... not books, or music, or anything else. Even if we can't agree on an explanation for that, music is obviously in a uniquely vulnerable position.