During the Ubuntu 9.10 launch a few weeks ago, Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth hinted that Ubuntu may ultimately gain music and entertainment store capabilities — similar to offerings from Apple (iTunes) and Amazon.com. Fast forward to the present, and Canonical appears to be preparing the Ubuntu One Music Store. Here’s why.
On the one hand, WorksWithU focuses mainly on Ubuntu in business. But we certainly won’t ignore the consumer market — especially when Canonical’s consumer efforts could potentially help to fund the rest of the company.
Although details are still sketchy, the Ubuntu One Music Store appears to be part of Ubuntu 10.04 (code-named Lucid Lynx). According to Launchpad:
“The Lucid music store project aims to deliver the ability to purchase music from within a desktop music player.”
Where will the music come from? A new online music store? Or some existing store? My best guess — and this is purely a guess — is some sort of connection to the Amazon MP3 music store, since Shuttleworth briefly mentioned Amazon during the Ubuntu 9.10 launch phone call with media. Also, Amazon in April 2008 released an MP3 downloader program for Linux, including support for Ubuntu.
So, three key questions for Canonical:
- Can Canonical actually make money from the Ubuntu One Music Store?
- Is the music store something completely new, or is it a simple connection to existing online music stores?
- Is Canonical stretching itself too thin by continuing to launch more and more services — from the original Ubuntu One (for shared storage) to Landscape (for remote management) and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (for private cloud opportunities).
I am reaching out to Canonical for a briefing on the Ubuntu One Music Store. But in the meantime I can tell you this: When my kids run Ubuntu on a range of netbooks and desktops at home there’s only one “consumer” application they miss: Apple’s iTunes. If the Ubuntu One Music Store fills that void, Canonical could successfully push Ubuntu deeper into the consumer market.
And that could lead to business success as well. We’ve all seen how Apple uses consumer success to penetrate business markets. I wonder if Shuttleworth is thinking along similar lines at Canonical.
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Tru dat. iTunes is the //only// Windows app that I miss. If Canonical can pull this off, more power to ‘em. Right now I’m dual booting 9.10 and Vista. Give me an iTunes alternative with DRM-free music, and I’ll be single booting before long
Jacob: Do you think this is a pure consumer play? Or is WorksWithU stretching here to suggest a strong Ubuntu One Music Store could potentially help to fund Canonical’s business efforts?
I hope this works in Canada.
Don’t do iTunes as it doesn’t run on Ubuntu, amazon is nice but doesn’t work in Canada.
Tried eMusic too, but their Canadian selection is rather crappy.
An iTunes alternative? Whats wrong with Rhythmbox? It works GREAT and does (from what I remember 3+ years ago) most of what iTunes did. Theres also Amarok, Songbird, etc. if you must have the pretty looks to listen to your music. Rhythmbox does palylists, connects to iPods, has intenet radio channels you can program, podcast you can tune into and more. Plus, its so simple and straightforward, anyone can use and and be efficient doing so. Not get confused by all the cool looks.
Also, why would anyone use iTunes (or Ubuntu One Music) and pay $1 a song when you can go to “gomusic.ru” and pay 10 cents a song for the same product.
Joe:
First… its important to note that rhythmbox already has the ability to purchase music from inside its interface. Both magnatunes and jamendo have rhythmbox plugins. What about purchasing music benefits from the UbuntuOne platform model? Is Canonical somehow planning to lock your music purchases into the UbuntuOne account?
Second… it’s difficult to see how Canonical could price a music offering in a way that had it stay price competitive to itunes and other retailers and be such a significant revenue generator that it was a funding source for other advancements. Doubly so if Canonical is leveraging existing retailers like Amazon for a music catalog to put in front of Ubuntu users. I’m not of the opinion that Ubuntu users would tolerate a noticable price increase compared to competing services for the convenience of using an UbuntuOne branded interface instead of using a web browser for purchases. If Canonical doesn’t charge more through UbuntuOne than through Amazon’s own webstore..how does Canonical make significant money from this?
And I’m not really sure why this functionality needs to exist as part of UbuntuOne.. or how it really fits in with the purpose of UbuntuOne. You know the RIAA really frowns on the idea of sharing music…and isn’t UbuntuOne all about easy sharing? I’d watch to see if this turns into some sort of
on-going subscription model in the vein of pandora.com’s personalized radio concept. Recurring subscription revenue seems more inline with what Canonical really needs UbuntuOne to provide..instead of a portal for sporadic 3rd party retail purchases.
Its unfortunate that this announcement comes after HP stopped offering its Ubuntu-based Mi interface. An entertainment portal like this through Ubuntu One was exactly the sort of thing that would have paired well with the Mi interface’s design goals.
This is noteworthy, but its difficult to envision how this really fits. Especially since Canonical isn’t expending resources to make this a cross platform service. Even Apple realized it was in their best interest to make itunes available to both Mac and Windows users. I don’t see how an UbuntuOne music service that is an island unto itself works out for end-users.
-jef
Hope they build a decent music player to go with it. One of the features that Ubuntu is really missing is a music player that’s on par with iTunes or the Zune player. I haven’t found one on linux that I like.
I’m sorry my blog entry raised more questions than it answered. But I’m happy to see readers interested in the topic. WorksWithU will strive to get more answers in the days ahead…
-jp
To #5 Jef… The only way an UbuntuOne music service could work (in our minds so far anyways) would be to offer music, audio books, etc that are unavailable elsewhere. That to me would make the most sense (cents) to me right now.
@ 1916home.net:
Exclusive mainstream entertainment content would be a pretty significant win for Canonical as a retail presence. It’s difficult to see Canonical making that sort of exclusive deal with a content publisher considering the small target audience that Ubuntu represents. Unless Shuttleworth agreed to pay a premium for exclusive rights to content knowing full well that he won’t recoup the cost of that expenditure. It would be more likely if the UbuntuOne service was cross platform compatible as something Windows users could use so publishers wouldn’t risk losing a significant amount of sales by locking out +90% of their potential customer base.
-jef
Frankly, sometimes I wonder why if you get the news from me you never link back.
Ubuntu has several music players that I like – I used to sue amarok 1.4 back in the day when i was using kde, and it was IMHO hands down better than itunes, no question. The only thing itunes offered was the ability to buy DRM’d music from apple. Heck, I prefer the amazon music store, which is all DRM-free, and they even have a native linux music downloader app to buy music with.
Nowdays I mostly use rhythmbox, and get my music from amazon. If it could be seamlessly integrated that would be a win for me.
Stefano@10: We always link to story sources. If we missed something let me know.
All: I’d be shocked if Canonical launched its own music service. My best guess is they are looking to link to existing systems in a simple, turn-key manner for consumers.
Right now I buy music via Amazon MP3 store have been for a while now. If they do this then I am all for it, go for it Canonical!
Well if launching such a service will help to make Canonical viable financially, why not?
exactly if they come with an ipod/iphone killer (of course based on linux) i’m in
why not ?
Ubuntu One already uses Amazon’s S3 so perhaps that’s where the “Ubuntu One” branding comes in, I think this branding implies an underlying major collaboration between Canonical and Amazon.
Now perhaps if Nokia got in on the action with Maemo and the N9xx series we could see some a real force for competition against the Ipod/Itunes domination.
It’s in the interest of all users that Canonical makes money – Ubuntu will get better, remain free, and hopefully contribute back to GNU/Linux.
If Ubuntu can deliver a good music store experience, sure, I’ll buy from them to help support their hard work. But right now I don’t feel a great need with the combination of Amazon MP3 downloads and Rhythmbox for a music player.
(And I’ve never understood why on earth would someone actually choose to use the iTunes bloatware and support one of the most closed companies in the business.)
Even if Canonical can provide an alternate avenue for delivering music, it isn’t even worthy of a yawn. iTunes isn’t just a great platform for managing massive libraries of music and other media, it also does something much more important: iPod sync and management. iPod support is critical. My iPod touch does not work under Linux with any player including Rhythmbox, Exaile, and Amarok. And I refuse to spend hours trying to do something as simple as sync up music and podcasts, so don’t bother pointing me to long wiki pages of half-assed technical documentation. I’m lazy and don’t have a lot of free time. If Canonical can make my iPod work without me having to do anything, then I’d be more than willing to throw some money their way. I wish they would stop being afraid of charging people for good solutions. I would gladly pay for stuff that works.
@twrock: iTunes is only bloated on Windows and that’s largely because of the way Windows handles concurrency which, in short, is poorly. iTunes is designed for Unix, where processes are cheap. iTunes works beautifully on Macs.
iTunes really is a great application. Any piece of software can play music, but iTunes really shines when put under a heavy load that combines shopping with managing large media libraries and media player management. It does have its warts but it is the best application I have found for the task.
After struggling with competing media players, using an iPod with iTunes was the first time I was just blown away by how simple and elegant everything was. It may be closed source, but Apple products give me the freedom to think about other stuff. Yeah, that kind of freedom is important too.
Canonical need to pull this off. They need to make Ubuntu insanely useful to all kinds of people. And it needs to be obvious.
aikiwolfie:
What’s obvious or insanely useful about linking a music service to UbuntuOne? What about a music store fits in with the UbuntuOne service? Why would a user need to or want to register and login to UbuntuOne to buy music versus just using a web browser or using a rhythmbox plugin tied directed to a retailer? There’s something missing…some tie-in which makes having an UbuntuOne account an obvious compelling as part of the interaction. What problem does an UbuntuOne backed music service solve?
My best guess, without any additional information. is that the UbuntuOne music store will tie into using the UbuntuOne storage area…so as you buy music the purchases are organized in your UbuntuOne storage area automatically and then the default music players in Ubuntu are configured to pull songs from the cloud. That’s the sort of tie-in that would provide an ease-of-use value-add and help persuade customers to pay for UbuntuOne subscription fees to have enough space to hold the music. I could even imagine a couple of ways to tie the music service to UbuntuOne subscription fees so strongly that it made a UbuntuOne subscriptions a compelling price point bundle for OEM purchases. The only thing missing in that scheme is cross-platform capability so the same cloud stored music purchases would be available on windows and macs.
-jef
In regards to UbuntuOne offering some sort of “Exclusive mainstream entertainment content”… this could easily be achieved by bettering Rhythmbox and by making it cross platform.
Itunes is for me also the only windows software I miss (that I can’t ‘wine’). It’s the only ‘deal-breaker’ that keeps me from removing my windows partition. I like my IPod- that’s one thing, but I also really like the ITunes interface so much that it’s hard for me to replace it even if I had a different media/mp3 device. My movies, pod-casts, ‘audible’ and other audio books etc are so easily, intuitively and centrally mannaged in an interface that is easy to comprehend. I may end up divorcing it though. I do hate booting into to windows.
I’d like to see how well it integrates into services like Jamendo or Magnatune and whether external software (like Songbird and Rhythmbox) can make use of this new service