Slashdot Mirror
AOL Making Media Player, Music Store
An anonymous reader writes "BetaNews is reporting that AOL Music is ramping up its efforts to release a new Media Player independent of the AOL client software, with a long-term goal of building its own music store. The company plans to bring AMP outside its "walled garden.""
Even though they write:
AOL says its new Media Player is not a competing product and has different audience, as Winamp users are not likely AOL users.
I really cant see why they shouldnt use winamp instead, and bless the aol users with a good player..
( I havent had any first hand experience with aol software, but the horror stories dont make me want to try it out...)
iTunes already has most of the market share, and AOL certainly isn't a very popular name among many computer users. People that use AOL will probably be semi-interested, but with AOL's trouble... that might not be very many people. Non-AOL users will likely choose iTunes over it, without much thought.
With a little luck, they might just break even.
We know one store is just as good as another if the songs are digital. The question is....
1.) Can they be cheaper than Apple at 99 cents with a product as good as iTunes.
2.) Can they be cheaper than Walmart at 88 cents period.
AOL-Time-Warner owns a huge part of the music recording industry. The software is just a means to an end: To make money selling music.
Are these the same walls that prevent the AOL marketing department from getting their filthy little hands on winamp?
Look what happened the last time someone slipped over the wall... *cough*Winamp 3*cough*.
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
Time Warner owns AOL. The other members of the big five would be dumb as hell to support this by opening their catalogs up to it. If anything, it would be an incentive to help the iTMS defeat AOL because every song that the AOL Music Store sells for them would also go into helping a competitor, Time Warner.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Companies are only as good as its best engineers, and yet top managers think engineers are dime a dozen like an accountant, so the bean counters do what they can do reduce costs and get subpar loosers who only program because its a job, not a passion and get subpar crud as result.
Why is there a work position such as 'manager' that has no real format training/dicipline like engineering and yet command 2-3x the salary? In our real worl, the engineers should get the 80k, and the manager should be on 60k.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I'm interested in precisely who is AOL's targeted demographic for this product.
l e-People-Laugh-At-Us-Player, or they might go for WinAmp, which despite being deprecated is still popular (yes, it's owned by AOL, but I think it's still tagged NULLSOFT, which sounds better AOL/NULLSOFT? That's a rhetorical question).
The way I see it, the average totally incompetent user will just use MS Media Player given it's preinstalled, and probably does all they want (and anything it doesn't do probably won't occur to them anyway).
Then you have the more competent, slightly smarter (not that smart, still using Windows remember *cough*) user, who while looking for alternative is likely to dismiss AOL's offering simply because it's, well, made by AOL, who don't have a particularly cool aura about them. Even when their aren't good alternates around, I'd imagine even these users are more likely to stick with Media Player than migrate to AOL's You're-A-Fucking-Retard-Let-Me-Hold-Your-Hand-Whi
The only remaining demographic is incompetent users, who choose AOL as their ISP, two problems: 1) This market is declining, especially given the fact they seem only to care about dial up users, who themselves are in rapid decline, 2) These users are the sort who use the interet at most about an hour or less a day, and are probably over 50. In short, they are the least likely people to be interested in purchasing music online.
In summary: AOL Sucks! and most people who might potentially install their product are beginning to realise they suck. Anyone left, who might install it as a tie in to this particular ISP's crap-ware, is probably not going to use it, and even less likely to purchase music from it (which is the whole point from AOL's perspective).
I used to work for AOL on this product from 2002-2003*. I personally worked on 4 completely different implementations which all got scrapped for one reason or another (usual reason: internal politics). I laughed out loud when I saw 14 months of pain being condensed into a single sentence in this article.
The AOL Media Player is targeted at their mainstream user base. Winamp is targeted at the technically savvy people. The Winamp user base typically is extremely sensitive to advertising and corporatism. Not trying to win over the winamp users to the AOL Media Player is a very good decision.
* worst job ever
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
only utilizing Winamp's "Unagi" playback engine"
:-)
So it is based on Winamp. Winamp's engine will be playing back the sound. It'll just have a different interface. Just think of it as a very different winamp skin.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
>iTunes already has most of the market share,
And Windows has the overwhelming majority of
the OS market. So I guess what you are saying is that if you are competing against a monolith which rules a certain field like Itunes does its field, then the only option is not to even try?
Good, I guess Apple will finally give up its puny 6% share of the pc market then.
>AOL certainly isn't a very popular name
>among many computer users
Which ones? The millions who left it or the even bigger millions who are still there?
AOL is as popular as Microsoft is in their market, you might not like but thats reality.
Geeks cant seem to grasp (or care) that the majority of users are not computer savvy, nor do they want to be. And once the BSOD went away with the arrival of Win2000, the majority of users are more than satisfied.