Comment by Phillip Winn

Tue, 27 May 2003 13:33:15 EDT

This story fills me with hope, because it shows me that the music industry might finally be reaching a tipping point where the interests of consumers are actually considered once again. It also fills me with disgust, that Microsoft could so misunderstand what it is that makes Apple's iTunes Music Store so popular. It should be clear by now that people want to own their music. If they are only renting it, then radio is good enough. It's easy enough to quote numbers about how much someone would spend to fill a 30GB hard disk (from another article about the same thing), but a hard disk filled with music I can no longer listen to because I quit paying a monthly fee isn't my music at all. It's easy to point to examples of what MS wants to do, but they're not listening to the consumers when they do that. We rent videos, sure, because videos used to cost $85 or more to buy and because most people watch movies once only. Now that DVDs are under $20, people are buying movies more and more. Maybe it would be cheaper to rent, but people don't want to rent. And music is obviously very different from movies. It takes a serious time committment to watch a movie, but many people listen to music in the background all day long, over and over. Repeat listening pushes the value proposition in the direction of purchases over rentals even more. I know lots of people who use iTMS, but very few of them have iPods. Apple's ads are about iPods because they want to sell iPods. Real life isn't about portable devices, it's about burning my music to CD to listen to wherever I want to. Apple understand this, Microsoft doesn't yet.

Blogcritics: Comments on Microsoft Working to Counter iTunes

Comment by Phillip Winn