Microsoft has come up with a fantastic new concept: a place where you can legally download music, for only 99 cents per song! If only someone else had thought of it earlier, and beaten them to the punch.
Seriously though... I know Apple didn't come up with the idea but it's pretty hard to pretend that they didn't make it very successful very quickly, and even harder to pretend you're launching a competitor, but have never heard of the iTunes music store. But apparently not impossible:
Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president for MSN said, “Our goal with the MSN Music service is to finally bring digital music to the masses by offering what we believe is the largest and highest quality catalog of legal music on the Internet, available on the broadest selection of portable devices.”
First off: which masses are they “bringing it to”? The millions of people in the world who are both trendy enough to want digital music, and yet who have been living under a rock and haven't heard of iTunes and/or the iPod? Do this guy really think there are people sitting on their couches watching iPod commercials and thinking, “I'd love to have digital music, if only I could find somewhere that sells it”?
Second: does he think that because Microsoft's PR group has been living under a rock? If they believe that the library of 500,000 songs mentioned in the article is the largest catalog of legal music online, they might want to, you know, check some recent numbers from their only serious competitor.
It's nice that they want to compete and all, but perhaps they should focus a little more on not sounding like they are either criminally ignorant or lying while they do it.
Subscribe