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MTV URGE: Impressions And Screenshots

Got a look today at the MTV URGE music service. Here, I present ten screenshots, and a walk through the experience:

So, the obvious stuff. First you create an account:

1 - Create account

There are several options. URGE All Access To Go lets you download an unlimited amount of music from the store and synchronize it to a portable device, for $14.95 a month (or $149 a year, saving $30.50 a year). URGE All Access gives you unlimited access to URGE, with unlimited downloads, but no synchronization, for $9.95 a month (or $99 a year, saving $20.40 a year). URGE By The Track lets you purchase songs, which don’t expire, and cost 99 cents a track.

To try out the service, sign up for the 14-day free trial:

2 - Free trial

You won’t even need a credit card, which is great news. I signed up for Napster’s free trial, forgot to cancel at the end of the trial, and got charged for two months of a service I never used. Meanwhile, at the end of your MTV URGE trial, they can’t charge you, and they just switch you over to URGE By The Track.

Here’s the main URGE view:

3 - Home URGE views
(click to enlarge)

That button at the top of the window reveals a menu when you mouseover:

4 - Top menu

There’s also an image bar that reminds me a lot of Mac OS X’s dock:

10 - OSX-like bar

There’s lots to look at. Here’s what you see when looking at a track:

5 - Song view

The features look to be great. Besides searching around for tracks, the home page has lots of features, each of which is linked to music you can listen to. Mouseover a button, and most of the time it fades backwards to reveal two options, Play or Go:

6 - Play or Go

Hitting Play will play all the music associated with that button. For instance, if the button is associated with the VH1 show “Best Music Week Ever”, the Play button will play all the music in that playlist. Here’s an example:

7 - Playlist view

The music comes in so many different ways, you could spend hours perusing through the library, trying out all the various playlists and collections. There are playlists from MTV/VH1/CMT television shows, including a whole bunch of those VH1 Top 100 lists. You could listen to the whole top 100, or dump the whole list on your portable player. Plus, there’s versions of songs not available elsewhere, like live shows:

8 - Exclusive TV content

The Go button takes you to features, while presenting the playlist at the bottom of the screen. You get an article to read, and music associated with that feature. For example, a current home page link has an interview with the composer from the Da Vinci Code movie, along with the music at the bottom of the windows:

9 - Articles

URGE has a very cool feature called Feeds, that works like RSS feeds, in that you subscribe to them, and the music in them changes at different times. So you subscribe to the This Week In Rock feed, and every week there’s new music in it. Yes, you can look at it every week when it updates, but the power is when you set up to sync the feed to your portable device. Every week, you get brand new top rock music, and it gets sent to your device. It’s like a podcast, but less likely to suck, and with music actually worth listening to. The feeds are archived at least a few weeks back, giving you even more music to look through.

11 - Feeds

It appears that most of the TV shows which have music in the service are included as feeds, so if you like the show and its tastes, you can keep getting its music. Also included in this fashion are music blogs, called Informer Blogs, and they all have feeds. When the blogger posts, they include a track list, and that becomes the latest entries in the feeds. You subscribe to your favorite Informer blog, and you get to read the articles and listen to the music automatically, something that would be nice with regular music blogs.

And that’s where I see a possible opportunity. If the people behind URGE are smart, they’ll open up the service to sharing. They’ll let you write a blog out in the regular world, add some RSS extensions, and let people to subscribe to that alongside the Informer blogs. Let your users create blogs that promote and support your service, and you’ll create a social phenomenon.

Anyway, Urge looks impressive. It officially launches tomorrow, but works in the leaked WMP 11 builds. It isn’t stable; downloads are very slow on my idle DSL connection, and the player frequently crashes, but that may have more to do with the fact that it isn’t official yet. Still, I like what I see so far. URGE has more personality and does a better job with music discovery than iTunes or Yahoo Music. I’m going to miss it when my trial expires, although I might miss it enough to actually pay for it.

May 16th, 2006 Posted by | Applications, General, Media Player | one comment



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1 Comment »

  1. [...] store, URGE, which comes built into every copy of the current version of Windows Media Player. MTV launched the service 15 months ago, with both MTV and Microsoft hoping the MTV name and the deep integration with Windows Media Player [...]

    Pingback by » MTV Kills URGE »  InsideMicrosoft - part of the Blog News Channel | August 21, 2007

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