Xbox Music, a new streaming music service from Microsoft, starts service on the gaming console October 22, and should span a variety of Microsoft supported products. The Xbox Music service will be the default music service for Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, and Xbox 360. The service starts out the gate with some fanstastic stats, and looks poised to take a chunk out of the various internet music and radio such as Pandora and Spotify.
Xbox Music Looks to Take on Giants Like Pandora
Music lovers are always looking for opportunities to sync their music across multiple devices, and many internet music and radio companies have made a point of making their service available on multiple devices as well as desktops. Xbox Music seeks to stay in the same vein, except don’t expect any support for iOS or Android anytime soon. Microsoft has no current plans for releasing service of their newest venture on any competitors platform, as they hope to use the exclusivity of the service as a way to tempt users into the Windows 8 ecosystem. There is no plan at this time to spread the service to Windows 7 users either, showing just how committed Microsoft is to pushing their new OS.
Xbox Music boasts over 30 million songs in its system at launch, vastly overshadowing the 800,000 supported by Pandora. The ability to sync your music seamlessly between desktop, Windows Phone 8, and Xbox 360 will certainly be appealing to consumers, but is it enough to pull them away from well established brands already in the field? Another downside is the price tag, with Xbox Music Premium coming in at $10 per month, as opposed to the premier Pandora One service which currently runs $3.99 per month.
Are you excited for Xbox Music, or just as happy to ignore it? Let us know in the comments!
*In an earlier version of this story we misstated that the paid version of the service still included advertisements for desktop Windows 8 users. That is incorrect, and we apologize for the error.