The Urge's interface
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There are a plenty of reasons to be skeptical of Urge, the new digital music service from MTV Networks and Windows Media that is, by default, Microsoft’s answer to iTunes. Reasons one through five: you can’t play their songs on your iPod, you can’t play their songs on your iPod, you can’t play their songs on your iPod, you can’t play their songs on your iPod, and — what’s that again? Oh, right — you can’t play their songs on your iPod.One week in, the concensus opinion seems to be — to quote one IT blogger — “who cares?” Betting against the iPod is dumb, and betting on a subscription model isn’t much smarter. (Like Napster and Real Media’s Rhapsody, Urge charges you a monthly fee of $9 to $15 for the privelege of streaming its catalogue, then piles on another 99 cents per song if you want to burn a track to disc.) But these are not stupid people. By branding Urge in conjunction with MTV’s cable empire — including VH1 and CMT — Microsoft is hoping that unique content will trump reduced usability, and that the music networks’ captive audiences will play along.
In other words, Windows Media files may be the 8-track-tapes of the digital-music universe, but Urge figures 13-year-olds will suck up the format in order to get their mitts on exclusive TRL outtakes and AFI playlists. (Never discount the value of a good celebrity recommendation: thanks to AFI’s Urge playlist, there are now possibly several dozen goth-punks who have now heard of E-40 and Keak da Sneak.) And, of course, the site grants the networks their long-held dream of being able to capitalize on the impulse-buy retail demand stirred up by their television brands, from VH1’s “Rock Honors” and CMT’s “Outlaws Live” — both of which have their own downloadable soundtracks on Urge — to VH1’s “Best Week Ever” and “I Love the ’80s,” which have their own Urge-hosted streaming radio stations.
Urge has also innoculated itself against an early backlash by buying up some of the best bloggers on the internerd: its “Informer” columns, which break down along genre lines, are intended to function like a cross between a tip sheet and a podcast — a written column accompanied by a brief downloadable playlist. (However, as the Houston Chronicle points out, you can’t link to these columns, and there’s no comment feature: thus, not really blogs?). If nothing else, Urge is paying some pretty worthy bandwidth bills. Matthew “Fluxblog” Perpetua covers pop, Matt “HoustonSoReal” Sonzala has the rap franchise, Pitchfork contributor (and Mac user!) Philip Sherburne writes about electronic music, and Jessica Hopper — who along with her pal Sasha Frere-Jones made Slate and the Times this month for accusing Stephin Merritt of racism — is Urge’s “Alternative Informer,” an odd title that makes her, and the rest of the staff, sound like rats. In addition to the bloggerazzi, Urge has retained Julianne Shepherd and Jon Caramanica, two respected freelancers (for Spin and the New York Times, respectively) to inform on R&B and country. And perhaps the jewel in Urge’s crown is Chuck Eddy, the legendary music editor fired earlier this year after the Village Voice came under the command of the New Times empire, who is writing — deliriously, as usual — about heavy metal.
How long the blogosphere’s microculture can mesh with Microsoft’s macromedia empire is anyone’s guess — if they’ve managed to snag Hopper, an ardent feminist, punk-rock idealist, and frequent critic of corporate culture, then one assumes Urge is letting its columnists out on a long leash. The columns appear to be edited — at least, the posts so far seem to make more sense and contain less slang than do the authors’ regular output. But Eddy, for example, is recognizably in prime voice, declaiming the praises of no-name hard rock bands in a gonzo style of his anti-canonical opus Stairway to Hell. It will be small consolation to MS shareholders if Urge turns out to be a better read than it is a listen. But with iTunes cornering the mp3-download market, Urge could to worse than to market itself less like a mall, and more like a library.
Even with viral media in its back pocket, Urge managed only lukewarm reviews its first week — cnet.com offered the most prominent kudos, go figure. But one issue that’s already threatening to darken the launch is the question of what, exactly, you’re installing on your computer when you download the Urge software, which also requires users to download Microsoft’s newly-revamped Windows Media Player. There’s a whiff of a Sony/DRM scare in the wind, driven by the language of the Urge user agreement, which “make[s] it clear that MTV can basically reach into your PC to monitor it (for attempts at content piracy) and/or make changes to it at will, without first clearing it through you,” as ZDNet’s David Berlind writes. Several passages in the agreement stand out, including this one: “The Software is also capable of monitoring itself to detect tampering or other security-related activities and has the ability to automatically transmit and communicate information about attempted tampering and other security incidents.”
