Microsoft confirmed Tuesday that its music store will launch this fall, under the purview of the software giant's MSN service. (MSNBC is a Microsoft-NBC joint venture.)
Several MSN executives and business development personnel attended this month's South by Southwest music conference in Austin, Texas, and gave independent record labels a private preview demonstration of what MSN plans to offer.
"We wanted to give them a first look at what we were thinking of, and give our team an opportunity to get feedback," MSN product manager Christine Andrews said.
Reaching out to the indie sector was a strategic move to involve them from the beginning, Andrews said. "Other companies took a different route and did not engage with the independent labels early in the process," she said. "We heard that the independent labels did feel neglected a little bit. But more importantly, we want to deliver a site that is great for artists both big and small, and great for the consumers, too."
This approach is not at the expense of major label involvement, of course, but it is more difficult to connect smaller labels with their artists' audience.
"It's important for us to make it easy for people to find, discover and purchase music from a variety of genres," Andrews said. "If we do that, it (won't matter if it's) something really popular, something from a niche label or something else that was previously difficult to find."
Few details of the nascent consumer product were available. Andrews said it was too early in development for that kind of disclosure, declining even to say whether Microsoft planned a store, a subscription service or a combination of both. Questions regarding pricing and catalog size were similarly unanswered.
The songs will be in Microsoft's Windows Media format, which has an integral but optional copy protection layer. This means they will play on more than 60% of the portable players on the market, Andrews said, and on the vast majority of personal computers. Apple's popular iPod series of players work with Microsoft's Windows operating system but do not support Windows Media.
