Web-based tunes--music to bloggers' ears

America Online's announcement Thursday that it had purchased the Circuit City-owned MusicNow and would adopt its Web-based music service as AOL's main store has got bloggers contemplating an emerging trend toward Web-based digital music services.

Many are welcoming MusicNow and the overall movement, which runs counter to Apple's iTunes model of delivering downloads through a separate software application.

Others, however, say it just leaves them using separate applications for managing and playing their music.

Blog community response:

"All I can say is, it's about damn time. MusicNet was a huge bulky client with very little support from within the company. It was horrible but once you got it up and running you dare not take it down. The features and premium services department handles MusicNet and whenever you talked to someone about what they could do to improve AOL services you would always get 'ditch MusicNet,' 'provide better tools for MusicNet,' or 'fix MusicNet.'"
--Mini-AOL

"While this would be useless to Microsoft, it could attract Google to push more to buy AOL. Google does not have a music download service, something almost every other major online player now has, and could take MusicNow's established product and give it the Google once-over, without having to develop a service or negotiate deals."
--InsideGoogle

"By purchasing MusicNow, AOL jumps headfirst into meaningful competition with Rhapsody, Napster, and iTMS. The catalog is over 1,000,000 tracks, and the interface is Web-based—that latter point perhaps being the differentiating feature. It might not be enough, but at least AOL is in the game now."
--The digital music weblog

"If you are using a website to download music, how are you going to manage your songs and play them? Don't you need another application for that. Also, if these companies are touting the web, they don't really mean the web!! They mean IE6 on Windows Web. Try telling them you have Linux and want to use Firefox. Good luck!!"
--Siva Subras on News.com Talkback