Microsoft Offers Free Music Streaming, With Limitations

By Ian Sherr

Microsoft on Monday is announcing new details of a plan to overhaul its online music service, including free streaming of digital songs. But there?s a catch.

The feature arriving with the new service, which is called Xbox Music, puts Microsoft in the ranks of Spotify, Pandora and other ad-based music streaming companies. It will also give Microsoft a selling point over Apple, which dominates sales of downloaded music but has yet to offer free streaming.

Here?s the catch: only PCs and tablets running Windows 8 and Windows RT, the operating system due out Oct. 26, will have access to the free streaming feature of Xbox Music.

Xbox Music is expected to supplant Microsoft?s Zune music service, which shares the name of the ill-starred portable music players Microsoft stopped selling last year. Besides hardware running the new operating systems, the service will be available on Xbox 360 videogame consoles and handsets running Windows Phone 8.

The service gives subscribers?at a price of $9.99 a month?the ability to download or stream songs on an ad-free basis. Microsoft, which styles Xbox Music as the first ?all-in-one? music service, also will include an online store for downloads, the ability to synchronize playlists across devices and artist-based online radio stations, a feature made popular by Pandora.

Microsoft had said earlier this year that Xbox Music was coming, but had not disclosed the free-streaming plan. It comes with another gotcha: customers will only have unlimited access to the free ad-based music service for six months, after which Microsoft may begin imposing restrictions on how many hours of music can be streamed.

Jerry Johnson, head of Microsoft?s music efforts, said he is committed to offering a free music streaming service. However, he said, ?We acknowledge that free terms and conditions may evolve over time based on industry standards.?

It?s not a first for Microsoft to offer new services that only work with new operating systems. But linking Xbox Music to Windows 8 and Windows RT does limit its immediate reach.

Microsoft?s Zune service was compatible with hundreds of millions of computers running Windows XP, software Microsoft released more than a decade ago, as well as Windows 7, Windows Phone 7 and the Xbox 360.

Owners of PCs running older software won?t have access to the new service at the outset, nor will people with Apple?s mobile devices or those running Google's Android operating system.

Microsoft said it plans to offer software that will connect Android and Apple devices to its Xbox Music service within the next year, but declined to comment about a specific date, nor whether that software was currently in development. Microsoft also said it plans to offer a way to access its software over a website within a year as well, though it wouldn?t offer specifics. Users of older versions of Windows that subscribe to the Zune music service will keep using it until they upgrade to Microsoft?s new operating systems, at which point their subscriptions will shift to Xbox Music, the company says.

Any unique selling point over Apple may not last long. The Wall Street Journal in September reported that Apple was in talks with music companies to create a streaming music service.

An Apple spokesman said the company offers more than 26 million songs on its service and has tallied north of 400 million registered iTunes accounts. Microsoft declined to say how many customers it has currently registered with its Zune music and video service.

The software giant says it has forged agreements with ?dozens? of record labels, but it declined to say exactly how many record labels it has signed deals with for its Xbox Music service, nor how many it had made agreements with in the past. The company did say four of the biggest music labels Sony , Warner Bros., Universal Music and EMI had signed contracts and added their tracks to the collection of about 30 million tracks globally, 18 million of which will be available in the U.S.

Other new features Microsoft says will be available on its service include an upcoming ability to share listening tastes on social networks, receive song recommendations based upon customer?s listening habits, and a forthcoming ?match? service similar to what Apple began offering its customers last year. The feature, which Microsoft tentatively calls ?scan-and-match,? will read a customer?s music library, replicate it in the Xbox Music service, and store any songs Microsoft doesn?t have in its servers to make them accessible from anywhere.

Source: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/10/15/microsoft-offers-free-music-streaming-with-limitations/?mod=WSJBlog

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