Daniel Dilger, writing for Apple Insider, captures an essential difference between Apple, Microsoft, and Google’s music efforts. The difference is the need for music to be a profit center.
On Google’s approach:
In 2012, Google executives were reported to be upset with the lack of interest in Google Music, and particularly dismayed its inability to bring in revenue. One aspect that hurt its adoption was the lack of a mobile app for iOS.
That means Google Music is a lot like Google Wallet: years ahead of Apple, but so poorly planned and implemented that it completely squandered its vast head start.
Google apparently expected its paid on-demand streaming music service to be quite popular among Android users, but instead got a taste of what its Android developers had already been eating: the platform does not attract people who want to pay for things, particularly not anything that can be pirated. Google Music mostly demonstrated the weakness of Android as a platform for supporting commercial apps and services.
And on Microsoft’s approach:
Microsoft’s very different approach to music and video also failed, for reasons that are useful to contrast against Apple Music and iTunes. When iTunes first appeared, Windows Media Player had been leveraging Microsoft’s near monopoly market position for a decade.
Initially a rough competitor to QuickTime for playback, by the late 90s WMP became part of Microsoft’s strategy to deploy global, proprietary DRM that could earn the company licensing revenue not just from PCs but from emerging formats ranging from HD-DVD to streaming content and portable media devices.
Instead of “opening” things up like Google—using inferior formats to sell content from hostile media companies it didn’t respect to its Android demographic of customers who don’t pay for things—Microsoft developed state of the art media formats with difficult to crack DRM and cozied up to media companies with promises of locking up their content so customers couldn’t even rip songs they bought to their own CDs as personal mixtapes.
Microsoft’s customers might have paid for this, had it not been so draconian in its restrictions and flatly tone-deaf of the desires of real people. Microsoft also suffered from the fact that Apple was offering a much less restrictive alternative in iTunes.
The whole piece is much longer and well worth reading.
Great piece. I have a Spotify account that I will be dumping, and will use Apple Music instead. However, I do feel that Apple is blowing an opportunity right now because iTunes is confusing to users both new and old. Apple used to be known for easy to use intuitive software. iTunes is more like a Microsoft product, with new features piled on top of old ones, and several different ways to do some things.
Looking forward to reading this, especially as it looks similar in focus to material which Dilger originally wrote years ago for his Roughly Drafted blog, a site which tended towards the harangue. His work has toned down from its former histrionics while retaining a candid editorial voice.
Yes, iTunes was fairly straight forward “port” of SoundJam – and for a long time this worked well.. then Apple added videos, TV, movies, books (?), etc… and its all in the cloud now … its a bit of a mess. It sounds like “Music” does not help that aspect (of confusion), much.
I don’t even mind all the stuff they crammed into it too much, but the user experience is awful. The navigation is weird. They should redo the GUI and borrow some good web design conventions for navigation.