Microsoft has announced a triple launch as its preliminary foray into the online music war. The three-pronged attack includes:
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The MSN Music Store
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Integration with other major (non-Apple) music stores
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New portable devices (not built by Microsoft)
Sound familiar? Yes, Microsoft has made these announcements periodically since last March. And on my machine, nothing is working any better than before this week's announcement. In theory, the MSN Music Store operates within Windows Media Player 10 (available here), just like iTMS opening within iTunes. The store integration (which is still a phantom promise) is suppoes to let you cross-browse from MSN to Napster to MusicMatch and others, all on one screen. The new players represent Microsoft's "Seamless Media Vision." It all sounds monumental, but is fairly vaporous as of this writing. Stay tuned. (Kee tabs on the developing MSN Music Store without the Windows Media Player upgrade, on the Web, here.)
1. Microsoft finally got off to a decent start months later after this blog. I've been on the
service looking for the in-house phantom poet
Literati X. While the super star studded interface looks magnificent, and the handling-
tour features quite easily convenient, I found the intergrated music stores to work seamlessly. Napster, PureTracks, FYE, BuyMusic, MSN and MusicMatch dose have a leading edge over the other on-line music stores intergrated into the state of the art Digital Media Mall, they all have the powerful experience of the spoken word Xplosion to offer over such rivals as MusicNow and Walmart. These guys need to catch up with the long tail.
Posted at 5:58AM on Dec 19th 2005 by SPOKEN X DIGITAL MEDIA GROUP