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Microsoft's Music Subscription Service
An anonymous reader writes "In a bid to compete with Apple's iTunes music service, Microsoft is planning to set up its own subscription-based online music store later this year. It is said to be working with record labels and copyright holders in preparation for the launch. Last September, the company unveiled its MSN-branded music site but it didn't have a subscription plan." From the article: "The tentative features of the new service -- which is still under development -- include advanced community aspects and playlist-sharing. But sources say Microsoft is also considering a more direct attack on Apple, seeking rights from copyright holders to give subscribers a new, Microsoft-formatted version of any song they've purchased from the iTunes store so those songs can be played on devices other than an iPod."
Oh great. One more attempt...
At least we won't need to worry too much about Apple monopolying the market? (!?)
Seriously, do we need yet another music provider? I like to see some number or a pie chart as in who are taking the majority of the market and at what precentage.
And also, it is the reason to fire emule instead of Firefox and put "Dream Theater" in the Emule search box instead of the "MSN Music" search box...
So, instead of having to BUY a crippled copy , I can download another with MORE FUNCTIONALITY (added value??) and it wont cost me anything (well, just to the poor guys that happen to live in US...)
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
In other words, you can't blame them if Napster set the DRM of certain music to the most fascist restrictions possible. That wrath should be directed at the people who made that decision, not those that made that functionality possible.
Personally, I'm interested to see what buying power they will have with the labels who will, naturally, try and enforce heavily DRM'ed content which will only serve to put customers off.
In addition, how the EU (America might make noises, but as shown in the past, won't do anything much about it) will view the integration of their music service with the "buy music" link in XP.
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That's why you're not seeing just MP3s from the majority of these companies. Those that do sell mp3s without DRM tend to be record labels or indie groups -- bleep.com, the mp3 branch of Warp Records, sells high quality mp3s.
While I agree with the sentiment, most people still call these files MP3. Personally, I applaud Apple's use of AAC, as it's actually a better format than MP3 -- it compresses smaller at the same bitrate, and it sounds better at the same bitrate. AAC rivals OGG in some sound tests.
WMA is one of the worst, beat only by Real's format and ATRAC3. Not that many consumers really care -- many of the artifacts and glitches in p2p-acquired mp3s aren't present in the first place, so the quality doesn't present itself as that different (plus they get no CD to compare it against).
Still, iPods don't play WMA files, and their dominance of the portable music scene pretty much guarantees that when people hear "you can't use Microsoft's service with your iPod," it will be relegated to a niche almost immediately. /prediction
Here's my take on it:
Google Audio Search
Audio content on the internet is in chaos. To reign in the chaos, and to capitalize on internet audio file assets, Google will launch an audio search engine or audio file search tool by 2006, but probably sooner.
I think that podcasting will fit into the equation. More and more audio content is flowing onto the web but it is in the dark corners right now. The podcasting directories and search engines basically stink. As time goes on, and as this content grows, it'll be time for Google to enter the fray. There is every reason to believe that advertising would work just fine with podcasting, especially if you find the content have the Master Index (read: Google).
But what about music? iPods are so dominant. Near the end of 2004 Apple's share of the MP3 market was about 87%. Even if that drops it ain't no big thing since the entire pie is still growing like crazy. This dominance of hardware drives dominance of iTunes. (I'm looking for disagreement of course, but throw numbers at me please.)
How to Download YouTube Videos
I agree, I recently purchased the new Gorillaz album , even after downloading some tracks on iTunes. Sometimes it is nice to see the hard work and dedcation a band, or in this case a virtual band, puts into making an album and its artwork.
I have modded you insightful.
I predict that this decision won't pan-out the way that Microsoft intends. Users will see it simply as an additional reason to buy from the iTunes store "buy AAC get Windows-version free.
I totally agree...I listen to cd's in my car all the time (I'm a loser with no car mp3 player) and I honestly don't think I will stop buying cd's for a long time. I went through my download phase, but I've gone back to cd's...even now when I download a song or two I usually end up buying the whole album anyway. It just seems so much more cohesive that way. And there's something great about being able to just hand someone a big 'ol book and telling them to put on some music.
...no two people are not on fire.
What --- is "U Can't Touch This" the new name for their DRM mechanism?
This will be an optional download from microsoft.com and not built into Windows? Or will they buy their way into this market as well, the cost being the inevitable lawsuits from existing service providers who don't like Microsoft abusing their monopoly in this way?
I found a tune I wanted on the UK MSN site, so went to download it. I checked the FAQ first and was told that I only needed WM player 7 or above. So I went to get the song. I paid 69p for it having to make a credit first. Then I got taken to a page where I was informed that I had to download Music Manaager software BEFORE I could download and play the song. This was NOWHERE in the FAQ. So I cancelled the subscription, and complained informing them that I used another provider instead, and was extremely disappointed in the sly tactics at getting me to install DRM software. GOt my money back at least, but peed off anyway. DON'T USE MSN MUSIC IN THE UK!!
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Care to provide a link to something that works? The Beale Screamer code will no longer work and only worked on one form of MS DRM anyway. You can do a D-A-D conversion with quality loss, but I have yet to find anything that just "strips" the DRM from these files. I don't even care if they stay in wma format.
I have a music subscription, and I honestly do not mind paying for it. I like having the ability to listen to this stuff whenever I feel the desire without having to worry about local storage and backups. I can always grab another copy with no problem. The big problem is that I bought an MP3 player before these services started, and it does not support the DRM that these services are using. I would love to be able to drop the DRM and put it on my protable to listen to. I really have no desire to save it to my hard drive (like I said, $5-$10/month is reasonable for music) just to listen to it on my portable.
Let's say I want a song in Mp3 format- I can get it. I can also get it in Ogg-Vorbis format, or any format I want. Do I want to listen to music and not buy any? Can do it for 50$ a year (which, when compared to XM Radio and the like, is cheaper). And then I can grab music to DO WHATEVER I WANT to for 79 cents a pop. In whatever format I like.
click me
I concur, and this is why I regret using the world monopoly when I wanted to speak to market share concerns. It was hyperbolic of me, and I take the remark back and apologize.
Then again, what about iTunes tracks only working on iPods and not other music players? One could perceive this as monopolistic, and then the monopoly point would be non-hyperbolic.
Any thoughts?
The Crimson Dragon
I've always been the type who likes to create a collection of my own music. In the last few years, that has meant ripping stuff myself into FLAC format and then generating compressed files as needed (usually Ogg).
But now that I've tried out a subscription service (Yahoo) I'm a convert.
I don't worry anymore about what I own or have access to. I have everything. All I worry about is what I like, which is expressed through the rating system. I love it, and in my opinion, this is the future of music.
Regarding the Yahoo service in particular, I'm finding it quite good. The music is all 192Kbps (WMA), the selection is very good, and the UI is good. On the downside, the client software is buggy (it is in beta still) and the lock-in factor is pretty huge.
But for me, the biggest problem is the that subscription services - though available from a variety of retailers - are only available on Windows. Give me a cross-platform version of Yahoo (where cross-platform includes Linux) and I'll sign up for life.
(DRM/WMA is a big issue and I won't get into it here.)
There are a lot of people, myself included (at first), who used the store without owning an iPod. If Apple had wanted to restrict the store to iPod owners, they could easily have done so, but they didn't. In short, you can't assume that .m4p file implies iPod.
WMA can be licensed by any compay that wants to use it.
Really? And they get source code? What specific techniques are used to encode audio into WMA? Oh yeah... they're not available. Microsoft just points you at their pre-compiled library and says 'use that.'
All Microsoft licenses is the ability to use the precompiled WMA libraries for commercial uses (and even then only on Windows and to a smaller extent Mac). You don't get the source code at all. The actual spec on how to create an implementation of WMA isn't available except under an expensive license and NDA (and even then only for making a hardware decoder). Everything that plays WMA in Linux is reusing the microsoft-compiled WMA libraries (for Windows).
AAC is a published standard, with hundreds of implementations of the codec.
WMA is an unpublished standard, and Microsoft's implementation or bust.
FairPlay is a layering of AES (an open encryption standard) inside AAC, and is documented; in spite of the leagalities involved, non-Apple implementations exist.
WMA's DRM is still not fully understood outside an NDA.
If the reverse engineer it, Apple sues them.
Um... and Microsoft won't sue if you reverse-engineer WMA (and its DRM) and use an unlicensed implementation (and therefore not pay Microsoft for it)? Just because you reverse engineer it doesn't really give Apple too much to sue over. It's that these compnaies were then using FairPlay without a license that spun the lawyers into action.
No company can license fairplay to use it.
Fair enough; but Apple is free to make the licensing decisions it chooses to.
But recall that there are more than a few Microsoft technologies that Microsoft refuses to license.
If this is your idea of an open format, then I'll take closed formats.
An open format is one that is disclosed and/or published openly. There is nothing about FairPlay that is not openly published on the web. The internals of AAC, internals of AES, internals of how Fairplay joins the two. However, try to find out enough about WMA to implement it yourself. Or the DRM that WMA uses. Go ahead and fail. There is nothing about the WMA codec that is freely available. It's not an open codec, not an open standard.
I don't know of any independant software implementations of WMA (with or without DRM).
FairPlay (without its DRM) is an AAC file -- a format that has more than a few independant implementations. And the actual wrapping of the AAC into a FairPlay formatted file is also easily handled.
An "open format" in this case is much like the OpenGL vs. Direct3D battle:
There is exactly one vendor of Direct3D: Microsoft. There are no independant implementations of D3D. The various versions of Wine that run D3D games on Linux simply convert the D3D call to an OpenGL call; it is not an implementation of D3D by any means.
However, there are literally hundreds (if not thousands) of independant implementations of OpenGL. Its spec is so complete that the Mesa project was able to start with the OpenGL spec and implement from scratch a conformant version of OpenGL. Apple has its own implementation. So does ATI, nVidia, SGI, Sun, Matrox, and Microsoft, among others. However (and this is the catch): Mesa can't call itself OpenGL due to OpenGL not licensing and/or certifying it. (Apple won't license FairPlay). That doesn't make Mesa (or OpenGL) any less functional, or any less 'open'.
The bottom line is this: I already have all the information I need to implement the FairPlay/AAC format; the spec is freely available. I can write a compliant FairPlay encoder, a decoder, and DRM protection facilities. And as long as I don't try to sell music using my implementation, Apple will be hard-pressed to touch me.
I do not have the ability or resources to even get the WMA specs to make a non-DRM'd implementation. I cannot write a compliant encoder, decoder, or DRM facilit
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.