New Online Music Store Coming - Microsoft + MTV

[XHipHop]

Thoughts? Supposedly the music store will be built into window's media player similar to itunes.

[Geert van den Berg]

I think it will become a succes as Windows is still the most used OS, MTV is very popular and everybody has media player as well. So a winning combination. But it will depend also on the how low their prices will be. I've never bought a song online yet, still buying CD's/DVD's.

[theblue1]

MS is pretty good at playing catch-up. MTV has heavy brand recognition. I suspect they'll do okay.

Me, I've been availing myself of online music buying and now subscription for the better part of five years.

I was a 'subscriber' to Emusic's old 'all you can download for $15/mo' plan (and got tens of thousands of classic and not-so classic catalog and obscure recordings).

Now, for $5 a month I get 160 Kbps WMAs streamed on demand and it's mostly great. (There are some gaps in their coverage, but I'd say I find about 85-90% of what I'm looking for. Biggest problem is that the player I have to use, MusicMatch Jukebox, once one of the best players, is now bloated and somewhat buggy.)

THAT has revolutionized my music listening in a way nothing else since my very first tape recorder back in the 60's... really, since I built my first stereo when I was 12.

I LOVE my subscription service.

[hmurchison]

Microsoft's music fortunes depend on WMA players being able to unseat the iPod.

Apple dominates not because iTunes is so cool but because the iPod is.

[theblue1]

I think there's some truth to that. I'd toyed with the idea of hard drive based players before the iPod came out -- but they were too big. (I ended up getting a small capacity memplayer around 2000 or so... mostly just to carry around mixes. It was really small and would have been pretty cheap, too -- if I'd remembered to send in the freakin' rebate claim. Ah well. Live and don't learn.)

I really gave some thought to some of the early iPod models. The fact that they didn't play WMAs wasn't a big deal to me at the time, because barely had any familiarity with the codec -- and, naturally, I think, I was highly skeptical of MS.

But my subscription service uses 160kbps WMAs and they mostly sound great. That got me to sit down and do my own fairly extensive listening tests and I determined that 160kbps WMAs definitely edge out 192kbps MP3s (which had been my old format of choice) and sounded better in many ways than even high VBR Mp3s made with the LAME encoder (my Mp3 encoder of choice).

At that point, I decided to rule out the iPod, with some reluctance. (If they made a bendable Nano that played WMA's I'd be on it in a second!) I ended up with a Sandisk 1 GB player that works fine (except for what I think is a fairly quirky shuffle mode) and sounds really pretty good. (They included good earbuds with it. I had some aftermarket Sony overears that were really uncomfortable and some Sony earbuds -- and the phones included with the Sandisk blew them both away. One prob w/ the Sandisk phones: the cable is just a little too short to put the player in a pants pocket! WTF!?! I have to velcro it onto a belt loop, which is actually semi-okay... but why not just make the cable long enough. And it ain't like I'm a b-ball player. I'm only about 5'10".)


But I do think the roll-out of the iTunes store helped synergistically in the marketing publicity.

Still, really, the fundamental advantage Apple has in guerilla marketing is their almost unholy relationship with a lot of pop media writers. Or, I should perhaps say, the unholy relationship of those writers to Apple. I do notfault Apple for fostering the best relationship they can with the press. That's only smart. But I do fault some elements of the press for being "true believers"...

It ends up in ludicrously distorted media coverage. I remember an NPR featurette, must have been 15 minutes or so, on the computer's impact on music recording. It just happened to coincide with the release of the orginal version of Garageband. And, in fact, aside from a brief mention of Apple's Logic, the entire piece was essentially a puff piece for Garageband. As I recall they never even mentioned another software package, not even Pro Tools. It was completely, utterly shameless. They called GB groundbreaking, revolutionary, and on and on. An average listener would have had no clue whatsoever that it was simply a knockoff of a program that had existed on the PC for about six years...

[T_R_S]

If it doesn't work with an iPod it will fail.

[Geert van den Berg]

Originally Posted by theblue1

I really gave some thought to some of the early iPod models. The fact that they didn't play WMAs wasn't a big deal to me at the time, because barely had any familiarity with the codec -- and, naturally, I think, I was highly skeptical of MS.

But my subscription service uses 160kbps WMAs and they mostly sound great. That got me to sit down and do my own fairly extensive listening tests and I determined that 160kbps WMAs definitely edge out 192kbps MP3s (which had been my old format of choice) and sounded better in many ways than even high VBR Mp3s made with the LAME encoder (my Mp3 encoder of choice).

But does the WMA file sound better than an AAC file? That's what I use on my iPod, it's the default Apple file type for the iPod as well.