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.""

Comments

Winamp

[Folmer]

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...)

Won't make much money...

[eeg3]

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.

Demographic?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm interested in precisely who is AOL's targeted demographic for this product.

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-Whil 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 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).

Re:Ahh... So they bought it for the name

[Cuthalion]

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

Re:Walled garden?

[Cuthalion]

Winamp3 wasn't marketing driven at all. The problems with it are mostly the fault of an overambitious and poorly directed engineering team. Not that I think AOL would have directed them in a positive direction, but they definitely took a very hands-off approach to winamp.

The value of Nullsoft to them is in the multimedia A/X controls and server components which AOL has integrated into their client, and which they use for the playback core in the AOL Media Player.