Microsoft and MTV to Launch Music Service

An anonymous reader writes "According to ZDNet Microsoft and MTV have joined forces to form Urge, a new online music service. From the article: 'The company said Urge would include a subscription component, as well as allowing individual song sales. A spokesman declined to discuss pricing, saying full details would be announced next month. The company gave no specifics on launch date beyond saying it would be sometime in 2006.'"

Re:Could be big

[flonker]

MTV hasn't been Music Television in many years.

The real question is....

[Chris Bradshaw]

I think the real question is wether or not they will be able to offer music from ALL labels. The way I see it, the major draw back to ITunes is the fact that any music on the SONY/BMG label is not available...

More Info on the matter:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11/16/parallel_i mports_australia/ [theregister.co.uk]

Re:Could be big

[Anonymous Coward]

As a college student... no. MTV is a lousy source for Music Videos, and everybody here knows it. You'd be hard pressed not to, since they don't SHOW them anymore. For a while, they had an advertising campaign saying "The videos are on MTV2, so stop asking", and MTV2 now is being invaded by non-music programming as well.

For Music Videos, people watch either Fuse, CMT, or they watch BET, depending on taste in Music.

Re:This is SO AWESOME!!!

[killjoe]

Dude, Apple is going to DIE. Nobody will be buying ipods anymore, iTunes will shut down any day now!!!!. MS has entered the online music market and they will KILL everybody else!. Remember microsoft-at-work? It will be just like that!

Re:The real question is....

[node 3]

I think the real question is wether or not they will be able to offer music from ALL labels. The way I see it, the major draw back to ITunes is the fact that any music on the SONY/BMG label is not available...

Not available... in Australia. The article doesn't mention whether it will be a US-only launch, or a world-wide launch, but these things tend to be US-only at first.

Which means it's most probable that Urge will not have more music available than iTunes no matter where you live.

It seems odd to me that a company would not want their music available for purchase as widely as possible. After all, a $0.99 iTunes (Wal-Mart, Napster, Real, etc) download is worth more than a $0 fileshare download. But if there was going to be a hold-out, it would be Sony, wouldn't it? (they could have owned the entire market that iTunes and the iPod now hold, if they hadn't been so paranoid)