If you’ve been hearing the buzz on Urge recently, it’s not about a deep desire or compulsion – it’s about MTV’s offering to the world of online music downloads and streaming.
Urge is a subscription based music download service in which its patrons can subscribe for a monthly fee of $10 and listen to as many of the 2 million songs in MTV’s coffers as they like. If they’d like to download that song, then it costs 99 cents each.
But it’s not just MTV behind the latest addition to the world of online music. Microsoft and MTV are working together on this one. Bill Gates must have seen the success of similar sites like Napster and Rhapsody and decided to jump on the bandwagon. Urge’s challenge will be to convince all those music lovers who prefer to buy songs and download them through sites like the incredibly popular iTunes, owned by Apple computers, that subscribing to a site and being able to listen to whatever songs you like, in whatever order and as often as you like is just as good or better than buying them one by one. It’s just one more battle to add to the long running conflict between Microsoft and...