URGE

» see urge.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

windows media player 11 was on every windows xp machine in my orbit by mid 2006. i was twenty two, finishing comp eng coursework in ankara, using wmp for the local mp3 library nothing fancier. the right hand panel of wmp11 had a tab called urge that opened a music store. i clicked it once out of curiosity and was told the service was not available in my region.

urge launched 17 may 2006 as an mtv networks property bolted into the wmp11 release. mtv had run mtv.com music as a small download outpost for years, the urge deal retargeted that catalog as a full microsoft-platform store with about 2.4 million tracks at peak. tracks were 99 cents apiece, the subscription tier was 9.95 a month, the premium urge to go tier was 14.95 a month for playsforsure portable device sync.

the pitch made structural sense at the table. mtv had the music brand and the cable-channel catalog relationships behind it. microsoft had wmp11 shipping on every new windows machine that year. you got the urge tab pre-installed, you typed a credit card in, you walked away with subscription music. apple's itunes was the larger competitor that year but ran a-la-carte purchases, the subscription model was supposed to be the differentiator.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the device problem ~

urge used the playsforsure drm format that microsoft had been pushing since 2004 across the creative and iriver mp3 players of the era. the format did not work on the ipod, which by 2006 was running away with the consumer mp3 player market in the us. the format also did not work on microsoft's own zune player that launched november 2006, six months after urge.

the zune launch was the bigger structural problem. microsoft shipped a competing music store called zune marketplace tied to the zune device, with its own drm format incompatible with playsforsure and incompatible with wmp11. that left urge subscribers with a catalog that played in wmp11 on the desktop but did not sync to the device microsoft was now marketing as the answer to the ipod. retail confusion was complete by the 2006 holiday quarter.

~ the postmortem ~

august 2007 mtv networks announced it was leaving the microsoft partnership. the urge catalog and subscriber list would merge into realnetworks rhapsody under a joint venture called rhapsody america. existing urge subscribers were ported across automatically. they had to download new rhapsody software and re-download their tracks because the subscription license files needed a new rights server to keep playing.

the wmp11 integration tab came down 26 october 2007. seventeen months from launch to shutdown. urge wikipedia still notes the verizon and frontier cable music channels carrying the urge branding stayed on the air until september 2010, three years after the wmp11 store was dark, a strange afterlife on the bottom of the cable guide for a service nobody could subscribe to.

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