henke on 16/10/2012 at 12:09
Ever since MS introduced a bunch of terrible apps, like Zune and Dailymotion, on the XBox dashboard I've been hoping a Spotify app would show up. I already often listen to Spotify while playing XBox games by turning down the ingame music and wearing wireless headphones that stream music from my computer. But this is hardly ideal, a dedicated in-XBox app would be much better. Sadly a Spotify app never materialised, but now it seems MS is (
http://www.avclub.com/articles/xboxs-new-music-service-giving-itunes-and-spotify,86756/) introducing their own streaming-music service called XBox Music. It launches tomorrow and will apparently have both a paid-for and a free ad-supported version. Details are scarce yet but hopefully it'll work just like the XBox's native musicplayer, which you can play music from while playing games and access by pressing the XBox-logo-button.
So many questions. What will the limitations of the free version be? How large will the music catalogue be? How much of a pain in the ass will searching for music without using a keyboard be? It's not like MS have a great trackrecord with music-services
*coughZunecough* but maybe, hopefully, this'll actually be a viable alternative to Spotify. Apparently it'll be available in 22 countries, though which countries those are seems to be a closely guarded secret since I haven't been able to find an answer despite ferocious googling. Hoping Finland will be on the list though, as I'd love to give it a try when it launches tomorrow.
SubJeff on 16/10/2012 at 16:32
Gawd, all these music services. It's so annoying because they are competing and dammit I want all my music available everywhere.
I don't want iTunes on my Mac, Spotify on my phone, Qrocity on my PS3!
henke on 16/10/2012 at 17:10
Can't you install Spotify on your Mac?
Anyway I only have 1 music app at the moment. I use Spotify on my PC, iPad and Samsung mobile. But in a couple of years I might've switched my iPad for a MS Surface, and perhaps I'll have Win8 installed and bought whatever the next XBox is gonna be called. Then I might consider switching from Spotify to XBox Music. For now I'm just curious to see how it'll perform.
