Microsoft Unveils 'Urge' Music Service

CHaN_316 writes "CNNMoney has an article entitled, 'Gates unveils his Urge.' From the piece: 'Bill Gates aims to take over your living room and late Wednesday he unveiled a new music service and new software to do it. Using an appearance with Justin Timberlake, the Microsoft chairman debuted a new music service, Urge, to directly compete with the iTunes music store and interface. Urge launches with over 2 million tracks for purchase or as part of an all-you-can eat subscription, an option the iTunes music store doesn't have. The offering will include exclusive material from MTV.' Begin the living room wars we must." Confirmation of an earlier story on this topic.

Comments

Re:Give us what we went, not what you want to give

[donnyspi]

I subscribe to Yahoo! Music service for $5 a month for unlimited listening. I listen to it at work on my PC. Not everyone needs an iPod to hear music.

Even more interesting...

[RingDev]

Check out http://www.urge.com/ it looks like MTV owns the rights to the Urge name and it might not be a MS name decision.

-Rick

Re:Give us what we went, not what you want to give

[AccUser]

Er... It is not difficult to transfer them to another computer, provided you are the user of both computers, and are prepared to register that fact. If not, then be prepared to burn pruchased music to CD first (which you should probably do anyway...).

-1 Troll

[DogDude]

"Stable platform"? C'mon. Can't you trolls come up with anything new? Windows hasn't has stability issues since the Win 95/98/ME days. At least come up with something that's marginally relevant or true. This pathetic FUD is getting really, really old and tired.

Re:Look at the sales numbers...

[cmoney]

huh? you need to clarify your iPod sales numbers because even this press release (http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/feb/23ipodmi ni.html) says 10 million iPods sold and that was when the second gen iPod mini was released close to a year ago. in fact, google the sales results for this quarter and analysts are expecting 11 million ipods the holiday quarter alone.

Re:Yet Another Music Store

[TiggsPanther]

I hate to reply to AC postings but I have to correct this.

WMA-AAC conversion via iTunes only works on iTunes for Windows. Unless things've changed recently without me noticing, it's not possible in OS X iTunes.

And if things have changed recently, please let me know as although I don't use WMA it'd be nice to know.

Re:Give us what we went, not what you want to give

[Yahweh Doesn't Exist]

you are talking complete bollocks.

MS lets you have your music on 2 computers ever, including the same computer uprgraded.

Apple lets you have it on any 5 computers at the same time. if you have 5 computers and buy a 6th, you can just unregister one of the old ones. I honestly don't see how being restricted to only 5 computers simultaneously interferes with any more than a tiny minority of legitimate users. and even when you are affected it just means one less computer - no music is lost.

MS's system on the other hand is guaranteed to affect every user who upgrades, and to effect them in such a way that they lose all their music completely.

Re:Give us what we went, not what you want to give

[Mr Bubble]

"Why should I be forced to burn music to a CD..."

Because the record companies are greedy fucks who don't get it and you're not going to have any sort of comprehensive catalog without a minimum of DRM at this point in history.

Next question?

Re:Look at the sales numbers...

[thatguywhoiam]

Before the /. crowd puts MS down for the count to Apple---look at the sales numbers.... MS is on track to sell 3 million xboxes (about as many ipods as Apple has sold) and has sold 5 million copies of Windows Media center.

Try 30 million iPods sold (as of Nov 2005).
It isn't even close.