musicNEWS:
Microsoft Announces Online Music Service for 04
11-17-03
Keavin
.
Microsoft Corp. confirmed Monday that it will
enter the legal online music market. Never shying away from a market that
involves technology that they can dominate, the Redmond, Wash., based company
plans to offer their own version of a song-downloading service next year,
according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.
They will enter a market place that has
suddenly become rather crowded after Apple Corps iTunes proved earlier
this year that the business model would work and people would actually
pay a buck to download a song legally.
Apples success was quite a coup considering
the music industrys bull headed reluctance to embrace the Internet. Apple
seemed like a good bet to try out the business model because their service
was only available to a small percentage of computer users. When
Apple succeeded with a quarter of a million songs downloaded on the very
first day, a big light bulb must have gone on above the heads of executives
in boardrooms across the world (not to mention the RIAA). Huh, we can
actually make money online with music?
Since then one company after another has
entered the market. In October, Napster came back from the dead as a legal
download service operated by Roxio Inc. Apple rolled out their PC version
of iTunes. They have sold over 17 million songs since iTunes launched in
April. And then you have Musicmatch, MusicNow, BuyMusic and RealNetworks'
Rhapsody subscription service planning to start offering individual song
sales.
Other companies plan to enter the field
as well with announcements from Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Sony Corp., Dell
Inc. and Amazon.com. Just what will Microsoft entering the market
mean? Its hard to tell at this point, but it is surely keeping some CEOs
up late at night.
Solid details are not known at this point,
we just know that contrary to previous pronouncement that it wouldnt enter
the market, Microsoft does now indeed plan to enter the downloadable music
market with a target of next year. Whether they can get past anti-trust
concerns is another matter that will have to shake out before any service
emerges from Microsoft.
What will set them apart from other offerings
is anyones guess. Going by their track record in the software field, you
might expect to pay for a song and instead get an inferior cover version
that crashes your PC for no explainable reason. But that is just
pure cynical speculation that helped us fill up this article.
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