Comments: 216 +- Microsoft Readies a Rival To Spotify on Wednesday July 15, @03:58AM
Posted
by
kdawson
on Wednesday July 15, @03:58AM
from the never-step-twice-into-the-same-stream dept.
from the never-step-twice-into-the-same-stream dept.
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.
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Microsoft feeling the pinch (Score:2)
Just how relevant are they these days?
Re:Microsoft feeling the pinch (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Microsoft feeling the pinch (Score:4, Insightful)
umm.. Chrysler is one of the biggest car companies in the world.
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Re:Microsoft feeling the pinch (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Microsoft feeling the pinch (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Microsoft feeling the pinch (Score:4, Insightful)
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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
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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 [microsoft.com]
http://www.microsoft.com/msft/reports/default.mspx [microsoft.com]
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...
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The fact that they slash 5000 jobs is no indication of how well they're doing.
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Re:Microsoft feeling the pinch (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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But we all know that this will be followed by the usual anal probing, once they dominate this market.
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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.
Re:Microsoft feeling the pinch (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
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Re:Microsoft feeling the pinch (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Microsoft is trying to do everything, huh? OS, Office software, server systems, hardware, web apps, programming languages, ...
Is seeing Microsoft as a single apparatus correct though or is it more like a bunch of bought up companies/development teams (huge though) that do their own thing? Can we even see Microsoft going in some direction as a whole or is gaining profit and having the same name the only common thing these groups have?
I think it would be really hard to coordinate an evil plan with all these p
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Re:Microsoft feeling the pinch (Score:4, Insightful)
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Nice of you to drop by Mr. Branson.
How do you not see the tie-in? (Score:4, Insightful)
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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.
Except to do this I would have to buy a Zune.
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And be in range of an open AP.
Re:How do you not see the tie-in? (Score:4, Insightful)
If it's selling music like iTunes then it'll compete with Apple and help boost Zune sales, if it's good. If it's streaming music then it'll compete with Spotify, and nobody will care as spotify is great.
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Good luck with that (Score:5, Informative)
I'm all for competition, but previous music efforts by Microsoft have been hilariously bad. This interview [pcpro.co.uk] is comedic gold for cluelessness. An actual Q&A with Hugh Griffiths, Head of Mobile at Microsoft UK:
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Last.fm is just fine (Score:2)
Last.fm is good enough. There are others. I don't see the value in another service like theirs. Last.fm has no commercials. I wouldn't want to trade a commercial free site for one with commercials.
Spotify and the US (Score:2)
Had this for decades... (Score:2, Redundant)
I've had one of these for decades--it's called a radio.
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Radio stations are roughly 50% ads and 50% the same songs they played two hours ago.
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Then it's just 50% annoying chat instead of adverts ;) It's the one thing I don't like about radio - there's too much inane chatter from the DJs. Much better to listen to some of the "music only" stations on Sky (and probably on DAB as well - at least for some of them).
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Planet Rock (UK www.planetrock.com ) is certainly not 50% adverts and available over this funny thing called 'the internet' & DAB. Pity it is not available on Freeview.
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Radio stations are roughly 50% ads and 50% the same songs they played two hours ago.
Roughly? I'd say pretty much exactly.
Re:Had this for decades... (Score:5, Informative)
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!
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Re:Had this for decades... (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
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Hugely popular? (Score:2)
So hugely popular I've never heard of it? Nor have two of my online contacts?
I've used Last.fm before they cut the UK off, and Sky.fm for streaming radio. I'm not sure what "Spotify" is.
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Don't bring the UK into this. I'll have you know only 95.3% of Brits aren't statistics savvy.
why anything Microsoft (Score:2, Insightful)
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I think that depends on the rental service. I've got an account with LoveFilm and can rent as many DVDs as I want each month for ~£15. Even when DVDs are cheap there's no way I'm getting the number of films I can watch for that kind of money!
As for the tie-in, maybe the DRM is where it lies - the service will be free as long as you're using a Windows Vista/7 PC or a Zune!
Is it just me? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Why not last fm (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
My prediction... (Score:3, Interesting)
...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?)
why Microsoft will eventually fail... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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That's your own interpretation of the sentence. Others, like myself, read it more like They aren't trying to do that stupid shit.
And I presume that the promotion of Zune, might be something like a free (popular/crappy/whocares) song a week if you have your Zune registered ("Free exclusive only for Zune owners"), or maybe a points system, for each X song you purchase for your Zune, you get X points towards a free song, or higher quality versions, etc.
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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.