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Microsoft Readies a Rival To Spotify
Barence writes "Microsoft has confirmed it is preparing to launch a music streaming service. The service will be a direct rival to Spotify, hugely popular in the UK (but unavailable in the US), which allows users to stream music for free in return for listening to around a minute's worth of advertisements every half hour. 'It will be a similar principle to Spotify but we are still examining how the business model will work,' said Peter Bale, executive producer of MSN." The article claims that the new service will boost the popularity of the Zune player, though how this is to happen is not explained. There doesn't seem to be a close tie-in between device and service, as there is between the iPod and the iTunes Store.
Pretty relevant I'd say, seeing as it's the largest software company in the world.
Launching their own in house streaming music service allows them to compete with both iTunes and Pandora in the music market, something they care currently getting their ass handed to them in. After all who would pay for music when they can just stream it for free on their Zune HD? It's a smart move on Microsofts part.
A Magic the Gathering Article and Forum Aggregator
umm.. Chrysler is one of the biggest car companies in the world.
How we know is more important than what we know.
And I'll say, if they can get this right, they deserve to be the biggest. Music could be dealt with so much better than it is, in terms of business and technology. If I could listen to a measly 1 minute of commercials for 30 minutes of music that I choose, and didn't have to pay for, and not break the law, I'd do it.
Yeah, I could just download whatever I want off of TPB or whatever, but I don't do it - not only because I don't want to break the law and get sued, but because I still don't personally feel comfortable consuming something which I did not pay the artist for. (Don't jump down my throat, I'm not judging those who choose to do it, but I'm just saying for myself no matter how I justify it, I'd be getting something for free which I shouldn't).
Get some good, targeted ads, make arrangements with the labels, and get this going in a good direction once and for all. Oh, and making the Zune not be an ugly piece of shit would help too.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
Radio stations are roughly 50% ads and 50% the same songs they played two hours ago.
Not if you live in the UK and have access to the BBC radio network.
umm.. Chrysler is one of the biggest car companies in the world.
And ExxonMobil is one of the largest companies overall. So what? Chrysler may have financial difficulties - Microsoft certainly hasn't.
why anything Microsoft fails is because they too strongly believe in DRM. the entire iTunes store for example is now completely DRM free, and all the market leaders right now are so DRM free. rental services have died a horrible death because DVD/CD media has become affordable enough not to pirate them (as in costing more time to download, then the money it costs to buy).. i put into account my minimum wage is at least 6euro's, put that over the time it costs to download 3 to 8 hours it's too expensive after about 2 hours. the same goes for subscription movies, it's a fucking waste of my money as its cheaper time wise to just get the dvd..
It's no surprise MS is going for this. Summary states its popular in UK, but it's really popular everywhere in Europe, despite needing invites to get account. Even "pro-piracy" forum users are saying in news comments how spotify has changed their listening habits and they dont pirate music anymore because spofity is just so convenient. I also am in long-distance relationship with my gf currently (was necessary for her school program) and we've always had similar music taste, so now we paste spotify links to each other in facebook or im to listen to something newly discovered good music.
This *IS* what music industry needed and its great they've understood it now. Now just bring the same for movies and games, I'm even happy to pay monthly subscriptions for it. Just make it convenient and easy for me.
No, with Spotify you can choose the songs you listen to yourself. It's basically iTunes with a massive library and occasional adverts.
Actually I say occasional adverts. For some reason mine has completely stopped playing any. I have no idea why but I'm not complaining!
Is it me, or lately MS looks like a fireman with a watering can, running around trying to put out fires everywhere?
I mean, Zune (iPod), Bing (Google), this (Spottify)... Lagging behind the competition a little, are we?
My 0.02 cents
Last.fm haven't 'cut the UK off', in fact the UK is one of three countries (along with the US and Germany), where Last.fm is still available for free.
Now they tell you that it will only be one minute of commercials for every 30 minutes of music...
But we all know that this will be followed by the usual anal probing, once they dominate this market.
She made the willows dance
The Apple reference is justified here - MSN spokesman claims new project will benefit Zune, but the two are not closely tied. Summary then cites an example of where a strong tie between device and service has benefited another company in a comparable situation.
Seems like a desire to attack Apple/Slashdot/both has clouded your reading comprehension.
Don't bring the UK into this. I'll have you know only 95.3% of Brits aren't statistics savvy.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
Radio stations are roughly 50% ads and 50% the same songs they played two hours ago.
Roughly? I'd say pretty much exactly.
I am the lawn!
Last.fm, at least in the UK (I'm not sure about in the US) doesn't allow you to create playlists, or listen to one song over and over an unlimited amount of times. Nor does it allow you to listen, start to finish, to an album.
Spotify does. As previously stated by someone in the comments, it's basically just iTunes with a massive, cloud-stored library of music that plays as soon as you click it (the buffering is completely unnoticeable.)
Laukei
So why should i use this instead of lastfm which features no adverts per half hour of music
Because it's the fastest music player with the smallest footprint available that lets you listen to *any song* you want.
You can search and play a song in milliseconds.
There is no equal, period.
One minute ads per half hour doesn't sound so bad to me either. Given the temperatures and the ensuing fluids consumption, taking a piss twice an hour sounds ok.
But you know how it's gonna end, don't you? 5 nanoseconds after that service hits the market a tool will be introduced that lets you cut that ad, records the rest in perfect quality and queues everything you might want to listen to automatically for the next ten days.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Most of the Virgin Group are actually completely operationally independent companies under ownership or part ownership of the holding company, withg different executives sitting on the boards.
I recently went to Oslo, from the UK, and when i switched on Spotify I received Norwegian adverts!
Well everyone at work uses it, so the best way I use it to discover music is to actually listen to each other's playlists.
To share a playlist just right-click on the playlist click 'Copy HTTP Link' and IM the link to a friend.
Other than that I just basically search for genre, i.e. 'acoustic', order by popularity and let it play.
They also have Artist radio (which I don't use very much), which basically looks like listening to a random set of tracks from similar artists.
I've actually discovered a lot more music I like on Spotify than any other service for a long time.
It's actually that good a service that I'm probably one of the few people paying the monthly £9.99 p/m to listen to music without interruption, as I think the service is actually worth paying for.
Their ex-staff might have financial difficulties, but I don't see anything in that link that shows that Microsoft has financial difficulties.
So far they don't look like they're hurting.
http://www.microsoft.com/msft/earnings/FY09/earn_rel_q2_09.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/msft/reports/default.mspx
If that's considered "financial difficulty" I wouldn't mind having more of that.
Maybe on July 23 they might declare a loss against all odds...
mine stopped playing adverts too - i heard that it's a bug in the linux client
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
The fact that they slash 5000 jobs is no indication of how well they're doing.
...is that will use Silverlight. My initial reaction to this was "My God, it will suck: it won't be cross platform". Then it occurred to me - Silverlight is cross-platform. So not only would this allow MS to target a larger market, it would get SL on to a huge amount of machines. Oh, and it could be an additional 'pull' factor for Windows: You get free streaming, but you can only download (onto a device) if you have a Zune. And you can only use the Zune if you have Windows... or some such strategy like that
Obviously this is only my personal prediction, but I'm personally expecting this to be an offline app with embedded Silverlight stuff. Either that, or a .NET app (but I'm uncertain on that - what's the status of Mono with OS X?)
because I still don't personally feel comfortable consuming something which I did not pay the artist for.
Do you really think that with all the middlemen still in the loop that listening to 1 minute of commercials per 30 minutes of music is going to generate any significant revenue for the artists? I wouldn't be surprised to learn that any major label music available on spotify is counted as promotional per the artists' contracts with their distributors and that they get exactly 0.0% of all such revenue.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Damn you Linux hippes. On my Windows client I'm getting nothing but adverts to make up for all the ones you aren't getting. Yet another reason to hate the penguin.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Dunno about pandora, can't get it in the uk. Spotify is a bit like last fm, except that you get to listen to full albums (rather than a few tracks per artist), and it has a far greater selection of music available. Unlike the other services I've tried though, it does feel a lot less restrictive - just inserts an advert between every few songs.
Because someone at Microsoft feels the need to answer every existing web service with one of their own, they will ultimately fail.
This strategy is ludicrous and speaks volumes about the corporate mentality at the software giant. This "we must have our hand on the top of every arena" mentality will be their downfall. They are spreading too thin and have lost sight of their purpose. When you try to compete with everyone, you compete with no one.
They're using their grammar skills there.
yeah sorry - i mean a bug introduced by running the windows binary on wine.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
Nice of you to drop by Mr. Branson.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
That tool is already available for Spotify. However, the 30 second commercial every half-hour just isn't enough an inconvenience for people to abandon the superb client. And why would you want to record the music to your hard drive? First of all, that is probably legal in most countries, second, why would you want to waste precious hard drive space when everything is available from Spotify? (I see one reason for this: transfer music to your mobile device, but a Spotify mobile client is under production).
Don't be crazy anymore!
I'm all for competition, but previous music efforts by Microsoft have been hilariously bad. This interview is comedic gold for cluelessness. An actual Q&A with Hugh Griffiths, Head of Mobile at Microsoft UK:
You cant compare it to Last.FM or Pandora. Its more like itunes store or your local mp3 files, just that when you search for something you can just click on it and it starts playing. The great thing is that they've managed to do it so that it *does start playing right away*, no lag and no buffering even tho that its streaming. It just feels like those are on your own computer and the quality is good.
Advertisement amount varies by country. I heard my german and uk friends get more advertisements, but I get maybe 1-2 per day. And if those short adverts bother, its just 9.99e per month for premium without adverts.
I really hope they get the contracts worked out to move to us soon too; spotify has changed lots in europe.