Music Ally

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Read on for today’s Bulletin, and do pass this link on to any colleagues or contacts who  you think would be interested too.

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Microsoft has taken the wrappers off its new MSN Music service, which will offer UK customers a mix of streaming music and paid downloads. According to the Telegraph, it was due to launch earlier this year, but was delayed to get the details right.

It has to be said, some of those details are… interesting. All four major labels are on board, but the service will only have around one million tracks at launch, and hasn’t signed any deals with independent labels yet. It will offer unlimited streaming, but only to a limited number of “several thousand” customers initially.

Meanwhile, downloads will cost the equivalent of £0.79, but users won’t pay for them directly. Instead, they’ll buy credits first – £7.99 for 10 credits – which are then exchanged for music at a rate of one credit per single, and ten for most albums. Tracks are DRM-free and offered as MP3s or WMAs.

We can’t help thinking that the credits system is an unnecessary extra step in the process, especially if MSN Music is targeted at a mainstream audience who might not be digital geeks. It’s not the first time MSN has done something head-scratching with music though – earlier this year, it launched a mobile music store selling DRM’d tracks for £1.50 a pop that couldn’t even be transferred to a PC or another handset.

Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr turned up onstage at Microsoft’s E3 press conference last night to plug the upcoming music game The Beatles: Rock Band – and more details of the game were also announced.

45 songs will be bundled with the game, with others available to download from a dedicated online store. One – All You Need Is Love – will have all royalties from sales donated to the Doctors Without Borders charity. There’s a trailer too – the first sight of how the game will look. Watch it above and let us know what you think.

It’s been rumoured for a long time, but Microsoft has officially revealed a new Zune – the Zune HD. Due on sale this Autumn, it will offer a 3.3-inch hi-res screen, a built-in HD radio receiver, and a full-screen internet browser.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is also taking its Zune brand to its Xbox 360 console. Zune will provide TV and films for the videos section of the Xbox Live service, with more features due to be unveiled at the E3 games show next week.

There’s no news still on when (or even whether) Zune HD will go on sale outside North America, but the HD radio feature doesn’t bode well on that front. We’d heard rumours that Zune would be crossing the Atlantic for Christmas this year, but if true, that would require a model without HD Radio. And while they could stick DAB in for the UK market, that wouldn’t then be able to be sold elsewhere in Europe.

No? Watch it here. The ad – for Microsoft’s new application that creates a musical backing on the fly for your singing – is surely a spoof. And if so, someone deserves a clap on the back at Microsoft HQ, because it’s so far been viewed more than 640,000 times on YouTube.

Microsoft has been talking about its new MSN Mobile Music store in the UK, and defending its use of DRM for the full-track downloads, which cost £1.50 each yet can’t be transferred to or played on any other device (we reported on this earlier this week)

PC Pro asked why. “At the moment, to be honest with you, we don’t have the functionality in-house to provide a mechanism for transferring between mobile phones and PC,” said head of mobile Hugh Griffiths. “We’d like to have offered a fuller service, we weren’t in a position to do so for a number of reasons.”

When asked what happens if someone buys songs from MSN Mobile that are locked to their device, and then upgrades their handset six months later, his reply was simply: “Well, I think you know the answer to that”.

With talk of the industry shifting to “mobile music 2.0″ at MidemNet last weekend, perhaps we should label MSN Mobile “mobile music 0.5″.

Microsoft has announced the launch of MSN Mobile Music, a store sitting on its MSN Mobile portal selling full-track music downloads, realtones and music videos.

The store launches today, and is being run for MSN by VidZone Digital Media. It’s got licences with Sony Music, EMI and Warner Music Group (but not, it seems, Universal Music Group). It’s kicking off with up to one million tracks, 25,000 tones and 10,000 videos.

The mobile store uses the UK PayForIt billing system, charging users on their mobile bills. Full-tracks will cost £1.50, realtones will cost £3 (!) and videos will cost £2. It’ll work with more than 130 handsets from day one, and can be accessed in the UK by texting MSN to the shortcode 63463, or by pointing your mobile browser to www.msn.co.uk.

The press release doesn’t mention what format the full-tracks are in, so we’ve just visited the site to check. They aren’t DRM-free: under the Usage Rights section of the Help area, you’re told “When you purchase the music, you get unlimited plays for the content whilst it remains on the device. At this stage, you cannot transfer your music to another device or PC.”

In other words, for anyone buying from the store, their music won’t be playable after their next handset upgrade, and can only be played on a home hi-fi if the mobile handset is plugged into it as the source. When DRM-free tracks are available for less than £1 on various web stores, it’s hard to see MSN Mobile Music catching on.

Microsoft has announced that it’s currently delivering 3.8 million music downloads a month for console games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero, via its Xbox Live store. The company also reckons that so far, it’s delivered 45 million music files for these games, and estimates that this is more than 80% of all downloadable songs for music games.

Microsoft has also revealed that more than two million copies of Rock Band have been sold for Xbox 360 in the US – “almost 1 million more than the competition combined” – while Rock Band 2 has sold 363,000 Xbox 360 copies since its launch on 14 September.

All this is an effort by Microsoft to pitch the 360 console as “the preferred stage” for music games. Okay, so it’s not anywhere near the level of iTunes, but we’d hazard a guess that a decent chunk of those 3.8 million monthly downloads are going to people who don’t normally pay for digital music.

A week since Apple’’s iPod launch, Microsoft has revealed a series of new designs for its Zune and a deal with Wayport meaning Zune owners will be able to use WiFi hotspots at 10,000 McDonalds stores across the US to download or stream music from the Zune Marketplace store. The company also revealed (more…)

As predicted, Microsoft has unveiled its new range of Zune personal media players. The hard drive model gets a storage boost to 120GB, while the flash memory version bumps up to 16GB. New features include Wi-Fi streaming, with a $14.99 monthly “Zune Pass” allowing users unlimited streaming of more than three million tracks. The FM radio tagging feature we wrote about last week is in there too, as well as games. (more…)