 Welcome to Newsdesk on SiliconANGLE TV for Monday, October 15th, 2012. I'm Kristen Folletti. Microsoft launches Xbox Music tomorrow, a new music streaming service, which will compete against services like Spotify. Xbox Music will be available on Windows 8 and Windows Phone devices, but this won't be good news for Windows 7 users. Also, in anticipation of the Windows 8 launch, Microsoft has just released its first official Windows 8 commercial. Join us now with his breaking analysis on these Microsoft headlines is SiliconANGLE founding editor, Mark Risen-Hopkins. Welcome, Mark. Howdy. Microsoft is now attempting to become the next big player in the music streaming business with its new Xbox Music service. The service will be available on Xbox Live tomorrow as well as on Windows 8 tablets and PCs and Windows Phone mobile devices over the coming weeks. So what can you tell us about this new service from Microsoft? So the interesting thing about the new Microsoft music is that it's the same as the old Microsoft music. So not a lot of people know this, but as of a few years ago, the Zoom Marketplace, which is the old sounding name that Microsoft puts on top of its music services, it constituted 2% of gross revenue from Microsoft. Zoom Marketplace, of course, was the name of the marketplace of music. You could buy for stuff on Windows. You could buy music on the PC and, of course, on the Xbox and your actual now defunct Zoom music players. So most of the revenue, of course, was coming from music on the Xbox, movie purchases on the Xbox. They announced kind of quietly a few months ago, maybe a month and a half ago, that they were rebranding it to this new Xbox music. So it's going to be the same as the old thing, but with this new free option. So can you tell us how the Xbox music service is going to be similar to other competitors? So the similarity is going to be that the Xbox with this free option that puts it in the league is very similar to Pandora Last.fm and to a certain extent Spotify. Spotify is often thrown in there because it's one of the most familiar to tech readers these days. But this is well trodden territory for a lot of other trench music players. Even Sony has a service. It's almost identical to what Microsoft is rolling out here. So I heard you say the word free. So does that mean there's no fee to use the service? So there's going to be a commercial supported option and then there's a paid option, of course. So this is for the streaming side of things. Of course, as with Spotify and many of these other services, you can still buy individual songs and keep them in a library that allows you to listen offline and in other circumstances. So with the launch of Xbox music, they're going to remove the Zoom application from Xbox Live. So what's the purpose of the rebranding here? So the purpose of the rebranding is to just kind of rid itself of the Zoom moniker. As I said before, the service never failed. The Zoom marketplace was wildly successful in terms of revenue, in terms of a consumer brand. People associate the Zoom brand with that big fat guy that's got the tattoo that was the Microsoft fanatic. And it's just not a good association to have, especially when you have a wildly successful brand like the Xbox on your hands. Why not name it that? So do you feel with this new moniker Xbox music will have more brand power to stand up to its competitors? Without a doubt. You know, that's the thing is, it's not that this is a superior, it's not that any of these competitors have a superior form factor or UI. It's not like it's the best UI that they could possibly be. It's that it's better than iTunes, which is of course like the other dominant force in this marketplace. Even Apple fans will tell you, you know, they don't really enjoy the iTunes player, the iTunes marketplace. It seems kludgy and clunky in a lot of different ways. And that's why Spotify and other players that were just like Spotify like Sony took off so quickly is because it's just how it should work, right? I mean, when you open it up, it just feels right. This is how I want to consume my music. And it's not going to, it's not going to hurt Microsoft to try to emulate that type of success. So with its new name, is there anything innovative that Xbox music is bringing to the table that Zune didn't have? No, so again, I haven't seen it yet. We'll play with it today. I certainly will play with it when I get home and play on the Xbox if I don't have a chance to play with the Office Xbox today. But the, right now I have to assume that aside from the freemium option being made more prevalent, feature set wise, it's not going to be too terribly different. I mess with success. What other plans does Microsoft have for Xbox music? So, I mean, it's, you know, universally branding it across multiple platforms is a major deal. You know, I have to assume that they're going to take it to the web at some point as well. Other players have seen some success with that like Sony. Sony's is a total web interface, even Spotify themselves plans to take theirs to the web and have a total web interface. They're missing a whole lot of markets here by keeping it application specific and keeping it platform specific. So I understand the new services designed for Microsoft Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and Xbox 360 systems. Why didn't Microsoft make the new service backwards compatible for Windows 7 users? So this is this is interesting. I did a little bit of digging. I haven't come up with 100% confirmation on this. So we may have to have to be continued on this particular answer of mine. But from what I can tell, they're not disabling previous versions of the client for older platforms, which means I still can load up my Zoom marketplace interface on a Windows 7 PC or on my Windows Phone 7 PC and probably still access my purchased content and content on my device. That's going to be my guess. If in fact they don't, which in my, in my experience with Microsoft, it'd be highly unlikely they didn't allow that to happen, at least let people just kind of die off with that product line. If in fact does not occur, you're not talking about a major upgrade fee for most users in either situation. For the first, I think it's a year or so, there's a $15 upgrade fee from 7 to 8. I misspoke earlier on earlier broadcast and said it was $20, it's actually 15. I don't know anybody that has a PC that can afford a $15 upgrade fee to a whole new operating system. Likewise with Windows Phone 7, most of those people are on plans where they could theoretically be incented to trade in their phone for a new phone that with an upgraded operating system and better music access system. So do you think this is something customers will be upset over or something that they're accustomed to? So right now, the majority of the consumption for Zoom marketplace is on the Xbox. So there might be some people that are upset that they can't access it on their Windows Phone 7 because the people that have Windows Phone 7 are more or less fanatics at this point or are real big fans of Microsoft, just put it nicely. So there might be some upset customers there. There probably isn't going to be a lot of upset customers on the PC for the reasons I mentioned before. It's real easy to upgrade. Going back to Windows 8 for a moment, Microsoft is gearing up for a massive launch of Windows 8 later this month and they just released the first official Windows 8 commercial. Have you had a chance to see it yet? Yeah, I took a look at this earlier this morning, yes. So what do you think? Does it make you want to upgrade right away? So keep in mind, I'm not the target market for this commercial. So I know what I was going to know about Windows 8 before I saw this commercial. So I can't really say one way or the other. There's some interesting things I didn't know from this commercial though. If you watch it, it's all touch screens, all touch screens all the time. And what have I been saying every time we've talked about anything that has to do with the user experience on the desktop, it's all going to touch screens. They should have said an IDF and they have none. There's not been any deviation from any part of the industry. Since then, you talked to Kristen Nicole not long ago talking about Lenovo's new hybrid notebook touch screen lines. We've talked about a lot of other things on this. We've talked about a lot of other things on this program with the relationship to that. And Microsoft is emphasizing this right now. Yes, this may be a little bit of a weird interface for you to get used to. But trust me, when you have your touch screen computer, this is going to be so much more awesome. And that's just the message of brow beating into the user or to the viewer with this commercial. How do you think Microsoft is portraying Windows 8 in the commercial? I wouldn't necessarily call it hip and cool, but it's definitely, they're trying to pervade some sort of innovation angle. This is the next step in computing. This is going to make you and your computer's relationship a lot more easy. You find it easier to get along with your PC. I mean, that's just the kind of the vibe that it seems to be pervading with that. And it's not too far off with the right hardware and the right operating system and Windows 8 being that operating system. It's a nice user experience. And remind us again when the Windows 8 launches. October 26th. Thanks so much. Well, thank you for joining us today, Mark. No problem. Thank you. For all the latest in-depth coverage and breaking analysis on tech innovation, keep up to date with Newsdesk on SiliconANGLE TV.