Microsoft-MTV Project Takes on Apple iTunes

Microsoft and MTV have teamed up to create Urge, a music subscription and download service, designed to knock the iTunes service from Apple off the digital music throne. Early indications are that there is nothing revolutionary about Urge, although Viacom’s MTV is quite an advertising platform. The effort has two obstacles to overcome: the subscription model, and hardware.

Urge allows listeners to subscribe to its service for $10 a month or so, and that gets one access to about 2 million tunes. To purchase the song, one pays 99 cents, just like with Apple’s offering. Urge isn’t the first subscription digital music service: Napster (the legal reincarnation), Real Networks’ Rhapsody and Yahoo Music Unlimited were there first. As this is written, the latter is coming out of the computer’s speakers.

For reasons that aren’t clear, subscription music hasn’t caught on quite the way download has. Frankly, $10 a month for all the tunes on a service is a much better deal than the old way – buying a CD (or album, it one is old enough to remember what those were) for more than that and getting three good songs and nine lousy tunes. The-99-cent-a-tune approach merely means that one can buy 10 songs (forever, it is true) a month. Yet, that is what most people do (actually, most engage in music piracy, but that's another issue), and they do so largely due to portability.

The trouble with downloading, from Urge’s position, is the virtual lock the iPod has on the download market. What one plays music (or video) on shouldn’t matter, but Bill Gates is a multi-billionaire because his stuff doesn’t work well with that of others. Music downloads purchased on Urge can't be played on the iPod without burning the song to a CD first, reconverting it to an MP3 file, and loading it onto the iPod. This is what audiophiles call a major pain in the derriere. Most iPod owners just won't bother.

Will Urge break the iTune/iPod stranglehold on digital music? It will undermine it, certainly, but what is missing is the cultural icon – the nifty bit of hardware. The iPod was, and is, the icon of the first decade of the 21st century. Until something comes along to make the iPod less cool, useful and functional, it’s going to continue to dominate. That’s why Urge isn’t the thing Apple worries about. Steve Jobs’s nightmare is a cell phone with a 10 gig-flashdrive and TV screen. Nokia is more likely to make that a reality than Urge, Microsoft or MTV.

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

Home