Microsoft Ignition to Unite Xbox, Zune, MSN for New Music Posted by XanTium | June 3 23:23 EST | News Category: Xbox360

From .dmwmedia.com: [QUOTE] Combining an audience of approximately 30 million regular users, Microsoft's Ignition program, to be announced tomorrow, will leverage three of its largest services - Xbox Live, Zune, and MSN - to offer customers new music acts. The Ignition program will expose emerging artists to the broad Microsoft audience for a month, with the first participating band being Maximo Park from the UK. The band's first single will be offered as a free exclusive download on Zune, a free music video for download on Xbox Live, and as a streaming video on MSN. According to Reuters, Microsoft is "demanding exclusive content and hands-on participation from the artists involved." Christina Calio, Microsoft's director of music marketing, said, "We don't want the same thing that is going out on MTV." Ignition's success will depend in large part on the quality of the acts it promotes. Microsoft is hoping to be a filter for its audience, something MySpace, for instance, currently lacks. But it's the lack of a filter that many MySpace users enjoy. The ability to "discover" music and recommend it to friends is one of the success stories of the online social networking movement. Microsoft is, in essence, attempting to modernize the MTV model and distribute it over a range of services with which few companies can compete. [/QUOTE] Full Story: .dmwmedia.com

If MS Succeeds...they might take over the world.

MS just won't quit...guns always a blazin' at something new to rule...and they have the power and money to try and try until as eatshitanddie put it...they will rule the world...

this idea doesn't sound good at all, but i like the name "Ignition" as a service...

Gotta love how MS is trying to take over the world. Though i do see this as being one of MS big plans that isn't going to be as big as they originally thought, like the Zune being bigger than the iPod. But what can you expect when the Zune doesnt even support simple features like gapless playback?

I might just not have found the feature yet, but my iPod nano doesn't seem to have gapless playback either. Anyway, for the rest of it you're probably right. I don't think MS will succeed in the online music business. For one, the market for music players is already pretty much saturated, especially for the audience they're targeting. Secondly, they *will* come up with an MS-only solution that *requires* you to use a Zune, MSN and and Xbox 360 to get the most out of it. They're pretty hard-headed about that in every part of their product line-up, and it has always been like that. Customers don't like vendor lock-in if they can avoid it, and they definitely don't like it when their new toys don't work the way they expected (nicely along with their old toys). Last but not least, MS now seems to be pretending to somehow know what music will be hot, and what people will want to download to their consoles and Zunes in the future. This is not possible, because you cannot steer popular culture. You can influence it, but you cannot steer it. If you want to influence it on a long-term basis you need a lot more than just a download service with hand-picked tracks and videos that only works nicely with MS products.

great, just what we need, more censorship....oops, i mean filtering. there is a reason that the mp3 format is still number 1 (at least from the info i have read) - it works on everything and is not locked to anything. get a clue ms

lets see, i could care less about live, wouldn't buy a zune and am not a msn user and i am sure i am not alone. my next venture will be switching over to linux

Never mind this crap MS, get your godam video market place up and running in Europe and other places or you will have no chance in succeeding in the music era as well.

Well, I have an ipod and do not have a Zune. That being said, I don't think MS expects to challenge the Ipod in the immediate future simply because of the huge difference in numbers currently. I think it is more of a long term goal to perhaps sway at least a portion to switch within the next 5+ years. Perhaps when their current Ipod craps out from shitty battery life...MS wants THOSE people to think about the Zune when it comes time to replace.

I second that!. The artist of the month has been the same shitty Good Charlotte video since about February!. They never seem to update anything for the Marketplace here in the UK. I was browsing over some of the few things they do have up for offer the other night and its mostly overpriced crap. I saw Jessica Simpson videos for 230 M$ points a pop!! , yeah right! .

am i the only one who sees this as a good thing? why does every move by MS have to be seen as a move to take over the world or paying someone off? im no MS fanboy, but giving new artist a way to reach even more people doesnt seem like a bad thing to me. as for their "demands", i thought EVERY company has their list of demands if you want to put your content on their service/network, be it i-pod, MTV, VH1, or LIVE.

if this is going to get me more and newer content to listen to and watch, im all for it.

soon MTV will stand for something different...