MSN Music
Microsoft is launching its preview version of its new online music (and more!) service, MSN Music. Aimed squarely at iTunes, Microsoft is claiming compatibility with over 70 existing digital music players. The ‘Soft is using its new Digital Rights Management technology (DRM) called Janus to protect music files and prevent copying.
It didn’t take long for Apple to comment. Apple’s already taking shots at the “limited” selection of 500,000 available tracks and MSFT’s lack of iPod compatibility. I don’t see the lesser track count as a huge hurdle in the long term. Microsoft’s marketing muscle and ubiquitous operating system give them huge bargaining power with the record companies. That number will inevitably grow. ‘Soft already has some artists that iTunes couldn’t get (Radiohead because of their insistence on album-only downloads). This suggests a greater flexibility of licensing options that Apple would be wise to pay attention to. This is also typical of Microsoft when entering a new forum. They tend to start small out of the gate and then add features until they capture the mind-share of the populace. Internet Explorer springs to mind as their most successful example of this strategy.
The other drawback cited, the lack of iPod support may be a more important point, but probably not a significant one to the masses of consumers willing to purchase one of the 70 available music players but not willing to shell out what they consider to be a premium price for an iPod. History repeatedly shows us that the best products aren’t always the most successful products, especially if there’s a cheaper alternative. The iPod’s current success may not be sustainable without the injection of something New. To that end, I believe Apple is working on it. The speculation based on several job postings on Apple’s website for their iPod division suggests that the next level is going to include wifi, video and all manner of other magic. The 60GB hard-drives from Toshiba still hasn’t materialized in an iPod or an iMac so either Apple is keeping them all for itself and its board of directors or they have some as-yet unrealized plan for them.
Personally, I’d like to see the iPod remain a music-only device. Diluting them with video seems pointless. The whole notion of watching video on a tiny screen is baffling to me. Plus, you can’t watch video while walking, biking, skiing, coding or whatever else you do while listening to music. Audio is uniquely enjoyable as a source of entertainment, a counter-measure against excessive background noise, a soothing atmosphere enhancer and a drug. Video is entertainment that requires focus.
What’s interesting here is how Microsoft is pushing it’s playback technology. No doubt, people would balk at the notion of buying a music device from Microsoft – they’re not a popular company in the conventional sense. Microsoft has had a fairly poor track record with consumer devices. The Xbox (arguably, though not necessarily profitable at the hardware level) and keyboards and mice aside, their previous ventures into consumer electronics have been largely unsuccessful. Their set-top-box of a few years ago was a dismal failure (now being reincarnated as the Media PC). They have just recently pulled the plug on their wireless networking routers which surprises me because I thought they were doing quite well. I don’t think the public would be receptive to The Evil Empire selling them devices to play their music.
This is a clever play by Microsoft. Just like in its Xbox Live! business model, Microsoft sells a hardware license to player makers (game builders in the case of Live!) and then makes the money from selling the tunes on their online service (or subscription for Live! service). That’s on top of the heft licensing fees they charge to the manufacturers in the first place. All that and this time without the hassle of building and bringing-to-market a piece of hardware to play these things. It’s a license to print money. Even if the service isn’t as successful as iTunes, and I have no reason to suspect it won’t be, it’ll still be a huge revenue stream for the 800lb Gorilla of the software world.
But the public might be receptive to buying a media player from Creative with a Microsoft interior. And this is where the ‘Soft shows its Evil Empire underpinnings. By licensing their DRM system to third party hardware developers, they are able to finally shackle the unsuspecting public with something Microsoft has wanted on the PC for several years now: A hardware based software restriction mechanism. Janus, named after the two-faced Roman God of gates and doorways is already licensed by some big names in the portable device sector and will severely limit what a user can do with a piece of media on those devices. That said, it still remains relatively unprotected on the PC and it will only be a matter of time before someone manages to circumvent a DRM-protected file to get it to play on another computer or convert it to another format.
While I’m on the topic of hacking MSN Music, I believe their site will be a target for spoofs and hacks. Recently, the URL-spoofing hack in IE6 was responsible for some identity-theft attacks against online bankers. What’s to stop a malicious hacker from cooking up a site that looks like MSN Music and stealing a credit card number? Or, getting a user to click on a weblink that looks like an MSN Music site that tricks a user into using an unsecured ActiveX client. Because this system relies upon IE with an ActiveX plugin it’s dangerously irresponsible.
Of course, I’m writing all this (while listening to Arab Strap on my iPod) having never purchased a song on iTunes or any other online service. I’ve browsed their American store since it’s not yet available in Canada due to our xenophobic broadcast laws and have found it lacking in a lot of areas. Plus, paying a dollar for something encoded at a relatively low bit-rate also doesn’t appeal to me. Gimme lossless or gimme death!
(You could always switch)