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Microsoft's Online Music Store
jamshedji noted a short story that talks about Microsoft's Online Music Store. The market is already getting quite crowded, so it will be interesting to see what affect the monopoly's entrance makes when this goes down in the 2nd half of this year.
Microsoft should abandon that proprietary audio/video format they are clinging to and just go along with what the consumers have picked to be the defacto standard.
Sucks, doesn't it Microsoft?
They're already considering forcing Microsoft to remove media player, open some source as well as fining them.
If there's a bandwagon moving Microsoft have to jump on it.
I wonder if the M$ service will be like the others using their format.... That shortly after you cancel the service all the songs will stop working??? Can they actually get a license deal like apple?? If not is it even worth considering.
Evolution or ID?
is M$ trying to rule the world or should I say the general consumer world market? What's next M$ food products; just imagine the vir.... Yes I'm bitching, so does the world.
i think the slashbots would be amazed as to how many people rely on MSN for everything - just like I rely on google for everything - sure, I think to myself WTF?? but changing the homepage for the average user is not an option.
.99 and they will buy and buy in droves.
.sig
case in point - i recently put an ad out for a car that i was selling - a 67 camaro - the car has been sold and the AD has been deleted - i am still getting queries on the car from people who are using MSN's proxy or dns servers - I get about 1-2 call/emails a day -
what i am trying to say is that even though prior to deleting the Ad I put SOLD SOLD SOLD in description space - still i get inquiries - so here is the morale of the story.
People don't read descriptions they only point and click at what they think is pretty
and
People take what is presented to them as reality - if there is an Ad then the car must still be for sale - regarless of whether or not it is sold.
Hence, if people see 99 cent songs on their hompage they will not consider who is selling them - only slashdotters seem to do this - they will only see that the song is
i have no
* Ratio of (Songs available on MS)/(Songs available on iTunes)?
* Time until MS intertwines their store with their desktop?
* Time until Blumenthal of CT goes after them?
* Time until an EU commish goes after them?
* This whole brainfart of theirs joins Bob in the graveyard?
Support a few technologists in Washington.
iTunes hits it big and suddenly the market is flooded with competitors. That's the way it happens. Ultima Online started making a mint and along came Everquest, Dark Ages of Camelot, etc. Nirvana hit the big time and suddenly there was a "Seattle" sound.
After a couple of years only a few players will remain. The rest will either have collapsed, merged or been bought by other competitors.
I will say that I'm surprised that Microsoft is getting into this game now, though. But getting into the console field seemed pretty alien so I suppose nothing is too far-fetched.
What I'm waiting on is a content provider model where one of the big companies - let's say Apple - with access to a huge library of material allows you to create your own mini-store. Sort of like Cafe Press, I suppose. You can populate your store with anything from the massive database (although most will be specialty stores selling particular genres of music). I'm not exactly sure how you could put the proper intellectual property protections on it, but it would really be great if the store "owner" could then upload material (local bands, amateur work, etc) to sell in the store.
My sigs always suck.
Funny. When I think of what Microsoft's online music store would be like, I picture an extremely limited selection of music which consists of artists like Barry Manilow, America and William Shatner
Knowing the intelligence of the average computer user and their "oh it's microsoft it must be good!" I also see an MS online music store as going to 80% of the market within months.
Not that I'm cynical. really.
1600s - Tulip mania
1920s - Florida real estate boom
1959-62 - "tronics" boom
2000s - xml,b2b, the internet bubble
2003-4 - the music bubble
"There was a time when every oil company went out and bought a fertilizer company, for no good reason. It was as if what was good for Standard Oil was good for Exxon, and so soon all the fertilizer companies were gobbled up" - Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet's right hand man in Berkshire Hathaway.
Why should everybody start selling music all of a sudden ? Napster started it, then Apple did it far better, then Real Networks jumped in, then that great equalizer of America - Walmart, now the ultimate monopoly - Microsoft. What do all these tech companies have to do with music ? Perhaps nothing, but then oil giants did't exactly mix with fertilizer either. Such is the madness of crowds.
It will be interesting to see how MS fares against Apple in this market. It's all pretty much going to come down to execution. While MS has a history of out executing Apple in the business arena, I really don't think they can touch them when it comes to something more "artistic" like music.
One thing Microsoft could do (and I hope they do), is pay a commission to affiliates that make sales through their store. It would be nice if they opened it up with WebServices, and acted more as a music supply platform than the itms. Of course as long as they stick with wma they're pretty much out of the game.
Not to mention the tight connection (via the kernel, or whatever) between:
I have seen how this evil mess works together.
Start MSIE, visit www.hotmail.com. Boom, without warning MSN-Messenger has been started.
Start some mediafiles with Windows Media Player.. If you're lucky you might get a few IE-windows poping up, even though there are no errors. Don't even ask me how that's done.
With Microsoft's ever interlinking between the operating system and applications, you can bet that anything mediarelated (opening a mp3 in Windows Explorer) will result in a chainreaction of MS-events.
I imagine it will go somewhat like this:
Ofcourse any mentioning of MP3s in mail or messenger will result in a similar list as that one above.
I'm not saying it'll be a good product, but I expect it to do remarkably well.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
I bet Napster, MusicMatch, etc... are already getting their lawyers warmed up for this.
It's pretty easy to explain that a media player is an integral part of the OS. But if Microsoft actually tries to embed their store inside WMP instead of having it on the web in MSN.com and/or on their MSN service, I think they're going to run afoul of the Sherman Act in a serious way.
What about Internet Explorer? The world always used Netscape until IE came along.
I used Internet Explorer to download Netscape until Netscape became such a bloated, crap-filled browser that IE 5 looked good. I used IE until IE6 started growing mold because it sat idle so long and Mozilla finally produced a light-weight browser in Phoenix, err Firebird, err Firefox, yet still managed to include more features. I also use a combination of MyIE2 and IE itself for pages that have trouble rendering properly in FireFox, which is an issue that is really much less of a problem than it was back in the days when I used IE to download Netscape (remember when most pages had an intro page where you selected which browser you were using, or which simply told you to download one or the other?).
Or Windows Media (the format)? Real used to dominate, until that came along.
Again, look at what Real's player is and what it does on a Windows client. In this case, I don't use either format, but it's been years since I would even consider putting RealPlayer on any computer, as it was the worst player when it came to taking over your system and installing excess crap. With the format itself, Real's format was simply poor for almost any user, regardless of connection speed, whether because it didn't stream well or because the quality was poor. WMV is not always an improvement, but then I don't do a lot of media streaming, either, and prefer DivX for downloaded video.
I think that music stores are one of those things that just have to be "good enough". If one comes bundled with Windows, is easy to use, offers the same music and features as its competitors... why would the average user want to bother finding an alternative?
I think that in this case you're probably right, and with the fact that it will be integrated with WMP and will work with more hardware than most of the other music stores, it has a lot of reasons to succeed. No need to go out and buy an iPod or that new player for Napster, just use whatever you've already got or choose from all the devices that support WMA and (soon) WMV. The iPod might dominate the market right now, but I can't really say for sure that the dominance is strong enough to say that more than 50% of music players sold are iPods, or would be if most music players supported an online music store rather than just a handful of them.
Still, I think the idea that people have that MS will somehow undercut everyone in the price of downloads is slightly rediculous, unless Apple and the rest of the stores have been lying about RIAA pricing, or MS can somehow get a good deal with the RIAA. The other alternative is for MS to take extremely high losses just to make something popular that will never be profitable, and though that is something they've done before, it just doesn't make sense to me in this case. After all, the only place they make money on this whole thing is in the licensing for the players that people will be downloading this music to.
-PainKilleR-[CE]