Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft to Launch MSN Music Service in 2004
securitas writes "SmartMoney.com reports that a Microsoft spokeswoman confirmed plans to launch an online music download service in 2004 via the MSN Web site. The story was first reported in the Wall Street Journal (paid subscription required). Microsoft may undercut the per-song prices of competitors Apple iTunes and Roxio Napster. A reliable source is cited as saying that Microsoft has been in talks with major music companies and a post for a senior-level marketing position for the service was added to Microsoft's recruiting site last week. Observers expect that the company will use Windows or the bundled Windows Media Player to gain a competitive advantage over other services that require a software download to use them. Interestingly, in this May 2003 analysis piece about Apple's iTunes Microsoft denied any plans to launch a music download service. More at CNet."
I smell another anti-trust suit coming.. isn't this yet another blatant violation of the suit they settled not so long ago?
Please direct all bug reports to
Perhaps they'll underbid comptetitor's per song prices - but I bet they'll make the songs heavily DRMed.
ZZZzzzz. b0000riiiiing.
Another single-platform, WMA-wielding crap "service".
Observers expect that the company will use Windows or the bundled Windows Media Player to gain a competitive advantage over other services that require a software download to use them.
So the existing Windows Media Player will magically work with this new system without any additional downloads?
1. Spread Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt by announcing intent to compete
2. Launch inferior product tied to monoply powered desktop OS.
3. Work to bring service nearly to par while undercutting all competition with illegaly earned war chest.
4. Destroy competitors and cease innovation.
5. PROFIT!
My understanding is iTunes is basicaly a promotional tool to sell iPods.
I would imagine that Apples longterm plan is in 6 months or a year to renogiate the contracts, pointing out how much more succesful it was then predicted, and start making money then.
Aside from that I am left with a question, how exactly is Microsoft expecting to turn a profit from this venture?
Sure they can undercut Apple, but what will that gain them?
Microsoft has no iPod like device to sell.
I don't know, if I was Bill 'Money' Gates I would be tempted to give this particular market to Apple.
Obviously this will simply be crippled WMA files, but then again, AAC files aren't exactly a standard. I hate to say this, but the fight between iTMS and Microsoft on this may simply come down to who has the best selection and can offer the lowest price. I think someone else predicted this service coming when a previous story broke about Microsoft music devices/software. It doesn't take a crystal ball to see that Microsoft is going to capitalize on whatever everyone -else- does well. Just some early thoughts on the subject... - JS
So now we're going to be complaining about the Blue Sound of Death? What would that even sound like? Is it anything like one hand clapping?
Now we're in for it. I can imagine the DRM attached to an MSN music service would the most restrictive yet, allowing only one copy of each file downloaded on one PC, ever. The real run happens when the clueless user installs the latest security patch, only to find that none of their music works, and reads the fine print to discover that a PC is defined as "the unique collection of hardware, software, and specific Windows version that exists at the time of each music download". Don't like it? Well, if you had never stolen that music and put J.Lo out on the streets, this never would have happened, Bobby. Now, pony up for another copy of that track and we'll call it even, and might not even send Lars and Mungo to your house for a visit...say, would you like to buy a Longhorn upgrade?
"Linux doesn't exist. Everyone knows Linux is an unlicensed version of Unix"- Kieren O'Shaughnessy
What's going to happen for EU countries, who may force MS to take it out of their operating system?
People inside the EU will therefore not be able to use the system? Or will have to purchase Windows Media Player to use the system?
If this is the case, surely it'll hurt the popularity of MS Music?
Comment: Yes I realise the username 'fuckfuck101' makes me sound intelligent, no you cannot buy it from me.
I am in awe of these compaines wanting to jump on the online music bandwagon. I believe with everyone putting all their "eggs" so to speak in the online music basket they are setting themselves up for what I believe could be akin to the .com burst. With so many new online music services coming online, the only for-profit entity coming out ahead are the labels. With the strong-arm tactics currently being used by the RIAA and such towards file swappers, I can imagine there is a lot of overhead involved to run an online music store.
So this would explain why MS were so concerned about shipping a "substandard" version of windows without WMP... ...Otherwise they wouldn't be able to tie in all those European customers to a hobbled music service with a "oh look, you already have the required software installed" media player...
It's not that MS is necessarily killing competitors with each little feature, its more the way they use each toe hold to push forward into the next market and the next market and so on. Even if they were the worlds best and nicest software producer I think this kind of monopolistic action is extremely dangerous.
1984 arrives at long last and we discover that it isn't the government watching us, but Bill Gates...
I don't see how it violates the settlement, unless they prevent Windows users from using other music services. As long as you can still play the other stuff on your computer, there is nothing to stop you choosing whichever service you want. So they are not using market power to tie people in to their service.
Of course, they may well have a strategy to gradually extend the features available to Windows Music Shop users, while restricting these to other people - for instance, it may become a lot easier to burn CDs from Windows Music Shop than from iTunes, because of some obscure driver incompatibility that you need a degree in CompSci to unravel. Or it may be possible to play only Windows Music files from within Internet Explorer. I should stop now, before I give too many ideas to the folks at Redmond.
Microsoft are still allowed to compete, as long as they do it fairly. The moment they stop competing fairly, there will be a howl of protest, and the lawyers can start dusting off the terms of the agreement.
The classic guinea pig model. Let everyone else test technologies and when there's money to it, jump right in to the bandwagon. How original. Microsoft is hardly an innovator of technologies anymore.
Could this be Netscape vs. Internet Explorer all over again?
Once again, Microsoft is late to the game. Apple started it this time with iTunes (where it was Netscape with the web browser). Initially, Bill and MS were reluctant to get on the bandwagon with the Internet. Then, it started to leave without them. They smell money and take off after it. "Well, we'll just give our browser away for free and because it's installed by default, why would anyone pay for Netscape?" Of course many "average" users didn't blink and eye used IE and Netscape died.
Are we going to have the online music wars now? MS, again late to the party says, "Well, we've got Media player already installed by default and it's free. Now all we have to do is undercut everyone else on the prices of singles and albums and we'll own the market. If anyone matches our prices, heck, we've got so much money in the bank, we'll just give the music away. We'll also slip some DRM in and make our compression technology proprietary. Customers will love us for free music and the RIAA will love us for DRM."
Nahhh, Microsoft is definitely not a monopoly.
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
Rather than ask, "Why MS?" a better question might be, "Where are Tower Records and Virgin Megastore and Fye and Sam Goody?" These are all brick-and-mortar establishments who will be in the warehouse business when legal downloads do to CDs what CDs did to vinyl.
All music will be sold online, almost exclusively, within our lifetime, meaning there will be plenty of space in the market for the right retailers. How many of the "old names" will make the cut, and how many will be opportunistic "new tech" names like MS and Apple?
Maybe they can have enough clout to get past the DRM restrictions that keep me from playing the stuff in my car. My in dash MP3 player so far is incompatible with everyone else's offerings.
However since they push the WMA DRM'ed format, I doubt it.
They can sell bottled water by advertising it's quality over the run of the mill tap water.
Who will sell high quality MP3's that are better than lawsuit vunerable internet MP3's?
It makes as much sense as selling 8 track tapes because nobody has the stuff to copy them. It's high cost, not compatible with current generation devices (sure you need to buy new portable devices and in-dash units yada-yada NOT!) just to keep away from a de-facto standard format. Who can't play MP3's? Heck even my DVD player in the living room will play MP3's. There is no other format that will play in my car, portable, living room, etc.
Too bad the industry is bent on not meeting the consumer demand.
The truth shall set you free!
I take the view that this is a good thing (tm) for Microsoft to do. They're big enough that they may be able to muscle the record companies into cutting them a deal for the songs. This of course will anger Apple and set off a series of lawsuits in every direction. Either way it shakes up the industry quite a bit, and that's what we need. Lots of competition. And I imagine M$ is bound to lose money anyway on this deal, since they don't have a hardware player. And if it did come down to litigation, I don't think anyone would be sorry to see lawsuits directed at the RIAA or M$
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
I can't believe people can be so damn nearsighted about the potential that Microsoft could potentially be providing a better service than their competitors. Moreover, why are you complaining about lower prices? Isn't that the goal of capitalism? It's only bad when Microsoft uses their monopoly (and that requires removing competitors) to gouge the consumer.
Frankly, if iTunes can't cut it, or if Napster falls through again, I'd more than happy to be a happy legal consumer through Microsoft. Sure, Microsoft may not support Linux, but did that stop GAIM, OpenOffice, Samba, etc? Hardly, and I doubt linux users will have a hard time getting access to music they already purchased, DRM or not.
And let us not forget that Windows Media Player is a damn good media player for the average retarded consumer using a computer. If they want/need more, they could go to RealPlayer, iTunes, Winamp, etc. See, it's often forgotten that it's not slashdot users that make up the majority of computer users, but rather gun-toting KKK members. They need easy.
I for one am happy to hear about new competition in the market. Go Microsoft. (and I'm no Microsoft fan.)
Usin p2p for pr0n is too risky. You might accidentally end up with illegal material on your computer.
Just use Mozilla and Leech.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
The problem is my nearsighted friend is that they will undersell Apple itunes until it goes under *then* gouge their customers.
Ever notice Office is like hella expensive?
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
It's the same M$ model as with the gaming consoles. They sold the xBox at a loss simply to compete with Sony and Nintendo. The idea (and it failed with xBox) was to gain marketshare, then do as they wished, just like with OS's.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
Uh, yeah, that's true. The "integration" argument against MS is completely stupid and should not have been pursued. Integration is decidedly and demonstrably BETTER for the consumer - witness Mac OS X, KDE, etc. All of these have various aspects of "integrated" applications, of course when KDE integrates the file manager and web browser, then it's INNOVATION!
Microsoft should have been brought up on anticompetitive licensing and marketing deals with OEMs. This prevented OEMs from getting an alternative product to market. What would the industry look like if Dell and Gateway had been distributing Linux for 5 years already? I think that is a much more winnable charge than this fuzzy muddy "hey judge, uh, they are like combining software and stuff".
(not that I don't think that great power demands great responsibility and that the government has the right to ask for open protocols and formats from the software that is used on the vast majority of computers, if anything at least for national and economic security - to my knowledge this didn't happen, they just kept flogging the stupid browser debate...on the other hand, it doesn't seem like the government really cared much about punishing MS)
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
And Jobs is not going to roll over the way AOL/Time Warner did. We'll finally find out what happens when the irresistable force meets the immovable object.
[Of course, Apple's case will be quite hypocritical, given that MS will be doing in Windows exactly what Apple is doing in OS X; but Apple doesn't have a monopoly, and that's the technicality which will matter...]
IANAL
I think we've seen before with MS that just because you or I consider it a clear violation of the Act doesn't mean that MS will actually face any penalty for it. At least in the US, no one has leveled any judicial penalty of note yet. I don't expect that to change any time soon. To clarify, I don't consider it a penalty when Microsoft can buy their way out by giving schools MORE of their software and compounding the issue by allowing them to count it as full retail value rather than actual cost.
I see opportunities for new "independent record companies", ie. new music companies that do not have the huge overhead and excessive middleman costs.
Right now the artist and consumer are the ones squeezed out. The cost of a CD is almost nothing to produce, it is all the money the music companies spend on advertising, high paid executives, buying time on MTV, etc. that drive costs up. The artists make very little of it.
But there could be room for a music company that eliminates a lot of the overhead and uses creative methods to advertise and distribute it's product. Possibly free or low-cost downloads of new material to get customers to try a new artist, etc. Most of the music companies big cash flow is in the younger music market. Getting kiddies to buy a Britney Spears album, etc. But as you get into the college ages people start to get inputs from new sources like student radio, etc.
The big music companies will jump on the MS bandwagon because of the massive size of the captive Windows market (the sheep) and because MS will guarantee them their artificially high prices. But if artists have a different avenue to take that gives them more control over their creative efforts and a better share of the profits they may be willing to take that route.
The music companies will continue to pump huge money into "last years thing" - think Sony paying Michael Jackson to basically produce nothing for them. Much of these losses will be hidden because the music companies are part of larger corporations that span many markets.
But over time free market economics would get them. That is if our goverment lets them. Efforts like the DCMA can try to stop this, but in the end I don't think it can. While there may be a law that says it is illegal to sell computer equipment that circumvents copy-protection, there is nothing that say an artist or a new music/media company is forced to release their material in proprietary copy-protected format like Windows media.
One way the big companies and MS will try to stop this is with "subscriptions". The spreadsheet MBA boys love a constant cash flow. Think cable TV. Think MS software licensing. They want that continued consistent cash flow. That is why MS formed MSN. They saw what AOL was making. So they will try to convince people to pay a monthly fee to download and listen to music. It will be like the cell phone companies. You will get so many minutes of music a month for a certain price. And you will probably pay a premium for going over a limit.
This could lead to some competition for the subscription market, just like there is in the cell phone business. But I think it may end up like cable TV. You will pay an artificially high price for a "package" deal that includes all kinds of music you don't want. Think the Home Shopping Channel, etc on cable. They will make the costs of buying just the songs you want high enough that many people will just "take the package" and accept it. Think of all the people who are up to their ears in credit card debt and just get by paying the monthly minimums. As long as they can go along with what society tells them they should be, they will pay their little montly charge to "be happy".
In the end the dinosaurs will go extent. MS may continue it's reign a while longer, but I think they are just stringing things out. There are opportunities available for success that lie somewhere between totally free or pirated, and over-priced and controlled.
IMHO.
Valoo !
Apple's case isn't hypocritical; they aren't doing what Microsoft does, which is integrate. They Bundle.
They don't make iTunes and *integral* part of the OS, the way Internet Explorer is. Even Safari isn't an integral part of the OS; you can if you like delete all the Apps (Mail, iChat, Safari, Internet Explorer, iMovie, iDVD, etc) and use your own (Thunderbird, AIM, Firebird, Mozilla, etc) without affecting the stability or reliability of your system.
With Apple, you can unbundle without any ill effects. The only technical aspect that might be similar is the way Quicktime and AppleScript is integrated into the OS, but that's been the case since at least Mac OS 7.6, or how recently Apple added WebKit to offer HTML rendering as a service; but WebKit is based on (and continually updated against) KHTML, and was added in order to compete with Microsoft.
GPL Deconstructed
Because they broke Windows 3.1 running under DR-DOS and made it look like an DR-DOS error. This was an attempt to get people to use MS-DOS instead. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
You've got to be kidding.
Someday I'm going to have to explain to my children how Microsoft ran the Xbox at a loss for years and won the whole gaming market away from it's competitors, and why Linux and the Mac never saw a game written for it again.
Someday we'll have to explain why our generation allowed Microsoft to move into PDA devices because it's Outlook syncronization was so darned convienient. Oh, and because it could play games and music.
Someday we'll have to explain why music once came on hard plastic disks and why we can't get music on anything but a windows machine because it played so nicely on our Windows PDA.
If that's not "tying" into other monopolies of theirs, we've truly got trouble brewing.
Observers expect that the company will use Windows or the bundled Windows Media Player to gain a competitive advantage over other services ...
..."
I think you meant "to gain an anti-competitive advantage
That's what tie-ins with the OS are all about, y'know.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
iTumes key advantage is that you can use with any CD player on the planet. The CD player is world's proferred music platform, here, not Windows or OS X. If Jane User can't got from her Dell to her Discman with one click, she's not going to use it for music. period.
So my question, which is: which online stores besides iTuines, support one-click burning to CD-R? These are the only viable competitors. (possbile exception: if most of the*cheap* CD players suppport "some other format," than a competitor may be able to survive on that. )
Steve understands that all comes down to: "Rip. Mix. Burn."
Does Bill?
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs