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."

Comments

Evil

[Mr_Silver]

Before we get the inevitable whine of people claiming that Microsoft's DRM is evil, please be aware that (up until this announcement) they merely provide the functionality for someone else to make a DRM'ed item of content as "nice" or as "evil" as they'd like.

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.

Re:.mp3 format?

[EggyToast]

it's very hard to "sell" a media file that has no copy protection. Two reasons -- one, it's hard to get producers to agree to the format, as there's no protection in it for them; two, it can be difficult to convince buyers to buy an unprotected format because they can simply get a copy from a friend/p2p. Having a group of people all go in to buy one CD and copying to all of their computers is precisely what it's trying to avoid (the p2p stuff is more of a side effect).

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