Consumers will resist the Urge

Someone once said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. URGE is Microsoft trying the convince consumers that the tyranny of too much choice in music is no big deal, and that they should throw away their iPods because they need more choice. I expect consumers will ignore this URGE, big time.

I agree completely. I think the subscription/rental model will never work for music the way it has worked for movies because the mediums are different. With music, there was the radio. Buy one device once, and for as long as you can keep it running you can keep hearing new music, for free. Renting movies worked because of the way we've experienced movies in the past: going to the theater. There's never been any radio-style way to watch new movies for free (at least not legally).

But music has always been something that you owned until the format died. Apple's decision to make iTunes a download service as opposed to a subscription service kept it familiar for millions of people who had always bought and kept music. The FairPlay DRM is open enough that a great many consumers will likely never run into it. Microsoft's DRM, on the other hand, keeps people tethered, since it constantly phones home and updates itself.

I stick with Apple because of the integration and the ease of use. But more than that, the iTunes/iPod package keeps my music portable, whereas the competition doesn't offer as much portability. I can buy one song from iTunes and never use it again, and still be able to listen to that song, which has been compressed to be stuck on a portable player. If I'm just paying for access to a database, I can't really take that anywhere.

I'm curious, Carl, what do you think would happen if Apple licensed out FairPlay and allowed other devices to access iTunes, or allowed iPods to access other services?

There's never been any radio-style way to watch new movies for free (at least not legally).

You don't watch over-the-antenna television do you? Granted by the time a movie gets broadcast this way it isn't new in any sense of the definition, however if you've never seen it before it is new to you and it is free in the same sense of the radio.

Carl,

You are the first person who has written about this today that really gets it. You hit the nail right on the head.

I have posted to two other "news" blogs today lambasting article authors who were basically saying this was the beginning of the end for iTunes / iPod.

What a load of...well you know. ;-)

Very accurately observed. Especially this bit:

Secondly, the store is incompatible with the dominant portable music platform, the iPod, making the available market for music buyers a niche.

..drives the point home very clearly, to me.

People who have paid good (let's be honest) money for an iPod now are certainly not going to throw all that away just because Microsoft and MTV offer them an alternative that is in no real way whatsoever any better than the iPod-iTunes combination.

The iPod's market share is too big for these tactics to have any chance.

I definitely agree with Carl's points. This morning out of curiosity I wanted to see what their interface looked like. To my surprise (not really) I found that it isn't available to mac users.

This makes sense given their choice to use DRM that isn't compatible with ipods, why support macs also. They also don't support them on the rest of the mtv video/music features anyway, so this isn't much of a shock to me.

One would also think that they would follow the trends and make their service one that is web interface based? Oh well I am not heartbroken.

iPod = Betamax. Technically superior, nicer design, but will ultimately fail due to it's closed ecosystem. These services and devices don't choose to not support iPod/Fairplay, they are not given the opportunity to. iPods dominance won't disappear overnight, but I think it will eventually happen (like Palm's PDA OS dominance was slowly chipped away by Microsoft).

The other thing the people always seem to intersperse is the rent vs. buy argument and the iTunes vs. everyone else. All of the subscription services also offer $0.99 tracks with virtually the same rights as iTunes tracks. Therefore, I don't believe this is a valid argument of why people don't use the other services.... although I agree that the "too much choice" argument is very valid.

The funny thing is that when Jobs deems that subscription is cool (and they can technically do it), all of his followers will also shout it from the rooftops. This is the man who last year was repeatedly quoted as saying "no one wants to watch video on a portable device", until the day he was ready to launch... then it was "look what we invented".