Apple has been the king of the digital music world for most of the last decade, and its iTunes Store continues to dominate the online music industry despite recent challenges from Amazon and Google. The combination of a tightly-integrated storefront and killer hardware gave Apple a combination that other competitors were unable to match — but just as consumers started shifting from physical to digital media a decade ago, we're at the beginning of another sea change in music. Companies like Spotify, MOG, and Rdio have emerged over the last few years, offering the promise of all the music you can handle anywhere you go, for the same price each month that you'd pay iTunes for a mere ten songs.
While Apple hasn't yet mustered a response to this growing trend, sticking with its hugely successful virtual record store model, Microsoft just announced it's ready to take on the streaming competition. The new Xbox Music is an all-in-one service that's equal parts iTunes and Spotify — while Microsoft is keeping the same a la carte store that it has offered for years, it's augmenting that with an updated version of its Zune Pass streaming service. For the first time, Microsoft will offer free, ad-supported streaming to anyone using a Windows 8 PC — just like Spotify — or a Windows 8 or RT tablet. There's also a Pandora-style Smart DJ feature for making artist-specific "stations," and for $9.99 a month, users can access also sync music to their Windows Phone 8 device and Xbox 360.
With this new service, Microsoft isn't directly trying to beat Apple — it's going after Spotify, Rdio, and all the rest of the streaming players out there. If Microsoft can be successful, Apple will be in the unfamiliar position of having to play catch-up in the digital music space for the first time. Success for Microsoft is far from assured — the company hasn't made much of a dent in the music world thus far — but it's hoping to use the strength of the Xbox brand, the ubiquity of the Xbox 360 console, and the wave of interest in its massive Windows 8 redesign to carve out a place of strength in the streaming world.
"We really wanted to build something from the ground up that solved a consumer problem," says Jerry Johnson, GM of Xbox Music. "It was clear to us that rebranding Zune doesn't solve the problem." Chief among the issues Johnson's team identified was the fragmented music experience many consumers have to deal with. Many music listeners have legacy collections of MP3s and also now use streaming services, sometimes more than one — Microsoft hopes to offer them a single experience that encompasses all listening options. Easier discovery and sharing of new music is another area that the company hopes to improve upon. "We wanted to do this with an all-in-one solution — music shouldn't be work, it should just work," Johnson says.
Social has long been an Achilles' heel for Apple, and iTunes continues to be no exception. As the software and store are based off an ownership model, users are not permitted to share songs with each other — the only built-in option is sharing links to songs in the iTunes Store via Facebook, Twitter, or email. Ping, Apple's recently-shuttered, first-party attempt at a social music service, was one of the company's most uninspired products and a perfect example of how out-of-touch Apple can be when it comes to the web. Sooner or later, that's going to have to change — if Apple ever launches a music service that isn't based on a la carte purchasing, social integration and easy sharing of music will need to be at the forefront, and the company hasn't yet really proved it's up to the task.
For its part, Microsoft is certainly not downplaying social, but nor is it going overboard at launch. "Sharing of music is very important," Johnson says, "and it's something we believe needs to be done in a measured and careful way." Specifically, Johnson's referring to "passive" sharing via the social graph and Facebook — "the hardcore group will like it if their friends are very much music enthusiasts, but you'll also hear a big group say they get very annoyed at the volume of things that flow through there." Xbox Music allows for active sharing via the Windows 8 charm bar, but passive sharing won't be implemented until next year. In addition to the "overshare," Johnson also wants to protect users who might not want to share their "guilty pleasure" listening habits to all of their friends on Facebook — though Johnson wasn't able to share how it'll overcome these pitfalls.
As important as those social hooks are, it's the integration with smartphones and tablets that really makes this generation of streaming, subscription services a viable option compared to their predecessors from the mid-2000s. For years, the vertically integrated iTunes and iPod combo was untouched by competition, but the launch of Apple's App Store in 2008 helped to break up this stranglehold. Finally, competing services had a way into Apple's hardware, which was previously locked down as tight as a bank. As iOS users now have a wide variety of music services to choose from, it seemed that Apple would have to offer streaming services of its own — but Apple's only move into the cloud has been iTunes Match.
没有评论:
发表评论