Microsoft has announced it will pay Universal Music for sales of their upcoming Zune mp3 player. Clearly Microsoft wants to get a foot in the door of the digital music business but as they have proven before (anti trust) once they start, Steve Ballmer and company will use every trick in their huge arsenal to kill the iPod and iTunes. Lets not kid ourselves Ballmer would love to kill Apple.
So how can Microsoft do this? Today many learned that even through Microsoft is losing money on each sale of their Zune unit they will pay Universal a set dollar amount from the sale of every Zune to get access to Universal’s music collection.
All in the name of going to battle Apple over the iPod and iTunes music store. They see music as the first step in moving content to portable devices. And video is next. Like everything else…they want to simply dominate the market. This includes changing the business of on-line music to favor them against all rivals. Nice to have billions of dollars coming in from selling Office and OS upgrades to cover the losses with Zune.
–But Zune isn’t even cool.
Many technology blogs commented about Google’s failure with their pay-for-view try with the NBA. It was so limited to the true (honesty true) die-hard fans. Only those would pay for each baskeball game…or it was just a test run to see how it would fare?