MTV Urge

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

~ the obit ~

Urge was the store Microsoft could not build itself, so it rented a brand. The deal was announced at CES in January 2006 and launched on 17 May: MTV Networks would run a music service, and Microsoft would put it inside Windows Media Player 11 as a tab, on the media player that came with the operating system. The catalog ran to about 2.4 million tracks. Singles cost 99 cents and a subscription was $9.95 a month, with a $14.95 tier called Urge To Go that let the subscription follow you onto a PlaysForSure device.

What MTV brought was editorial. Programming and video came out of VH1 and CMT as well as MTV itself, and the service leaned hard on human-made playlists at a moment when everyone else was selling a search box and a chart. There were 36 radio stations for free listeners and 138 for subscribers.

It was a United States product from the first day to the last, because the licenses were. That was normal for the era and it is most of why Urge is a footnote outside America: the store was bolted into a media player shipped worldwide, on machines whose owners could see the tab and get nothing when they clicked it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what microsoft wanted from it ~

MSN Music had already failed to dent iTunes, and Microsoft had concluded that running a record store was not a job it was good at. Urge let it keep a music store inside Windows without operating one. The tab was worth a great deal to MTV, which got distribution no marketing budget could buy, and it cost Microsoft a partnership rather than a catalog licensing department.

Then Microsoft launched the Zune in November 2006, with Zune Marketplace attached. The new store borrowed heavily from the Urge architecture and pointed at the same customers. Six months into its life, Urge was competing with the company whose software it lived inside.

~ the deal that ended it ~

In August 2007 MTV Networks announced it was ending the Microsoft partnership and joining RealNetworks instead, in a venture called Rhapsody America that Verizon Wireless also backed. Urge subscribers were told their accounts would move to Rhapsody, which meant downloading different software to reach music they were already paying for.

On 26 October 2007 the integration was pulled out of Windows Media Player. The tab that had been the entire distribution advantage simply stopped being there, seventeen months after it appeared.

~ the next chapter ~

Rhapsody America outlived the brand it absorbed by a decade, and the Urge radio channels had a strange afterlife of their own, carried by television providers like Verizon and Frontier and only quietly discontinued around September 2010. What Urge is worth remembering for is the size of the advantage it wasted. It had the best shelf in the store, on hardware it never had to sell, and it still lost to a program people had to go and install themselves.

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