MTV is setting out its stall to try and reclaim its music territory that has been land-grabbed in the past few years by Apple.
It’s launching ‘Urge’ as its new music download service offering users 2 million songs that can be bought either separately for $0.99 (£0.53) or via a monthly subscription. Urge will also be the featured music player on Microsoft's Media Player and will be compatible with more than 100 digital music players but not iPods.
Van Toffler, president of MTV Networks Music Group actually said: "We will concentrate on people who don't have iPods. Hopefully, through the TV channels we have and the dot-com sites...we can educate people about the virtues of subscriptions. It's not about selling a million singles.”
MTV, credited with giving rise to a generation of music loving teenagers and being the driving force behind popular culture in 90s America, has since lost its way because it has not embraced the changing nature of media consumption. The fact that a computer company such as Apple has managed to do this must be infuriating for MTV suits.
Someone told me the other day that YouTube has a greater reach in the US than MTV. That is the perfect example of how MTV has missed the boat, by being too slow to adapt to the changing market.
The YouTube model is simple yet effective; it is a media company that relies on interaction from its audience. That sounds remarkably similar to MTV in many ways and yet MTV is only now embracing music downloads as a medium in a meaningful way and cannot match YouTube for the amount of music video clips that are being posted and viewed. Music download is not a new phenomenon and there were plenty of signs it would take off even before it was introduced as a legal business, but still it has taken MTV until now to launch a service that fits so centrally with its brand.
To be fair to MTV, it is far from the channel that launched in 1981 with the exclamation "Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll!" But even taking into account the size of the Viacom owned company now it is a surprise that it has not reacted more quickly to a changing media environment.
What will be interesting to see now is how much of its coolness is still left? Does MTV still resonate with the youth of today, or are YouTube and the iPod their idols now?
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The success that Apple has is not down to the practicalites or quality of the iPod, but, in iTunes, having the most user-friendly music player available.
Until a competitor can produce something even close to iTunes offering, I doubt the iPod's dominance will lessen in any way...
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