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SCMP Reporter

Embrace, extend, extinguish. Analysts say these are the attributes of Microsoft's recent attempt to make its Windows Media Audio (WMA) the standard for digital music.

'What Microsoft did to the Web browser it is now doing to digital music,' said Andrew Rowsell-Jones, research director for GartnerGroup in Asia.

'It's embracing MP3 [Moving Picture Experts Group 1, Layer 3], extending it and finally it will extinguish it.'

Microsoft was seen as doing the same with its Internet Explorer, which stole the market share from Netscape's then market-leading browser in the late 1990s.

The MP3 standard was created in 1987 as a method for digitally compressing and delivering audio files. It became widely used during the 1990s, when different groups started sharing songs from CDs and posting them as files over the Internet.

Despite a proliferation of other competing standards, such as Liquid Audio and RealAudio in the market, MP3 is considered the most popular format in digital music. According to the International Federation of Phonographic Industries, at any one time, about one million MP3 tracks are being downloaded around the world.

Microsoft incorporated MP3 technology into its Windows operating system for desktops in 1997, and extended it to handheld devices the following year.

Last month, it unveiled WMA 4.0 which, it claimed, doubled the compression ratio of MP3 with little discernible loss in quality. Along with better compression is an embedded-rights manager, which is supposed to provide some copy protection for embedded files.

Frank Arrigo, business development manager for Windows Media Technologies, said: 'That's the flexibility we built into the licensing, and then the guys who provide the content can decide what the rules are.

'If they want, they can give the songs away for free. And the [record] labels, they really like that, because it puts them more in control of what they are trying to do.'

The world's biggest record labels - Sony Music, Warner Music, BMG Entertainment, EMI and Universal Music - are licensees of Microsoft's WMA.

Microsoft claims the technology has received widespread backing from businesses, with more than 80 companies testing or using WMA in their digital streaming services on the Net.

Joe Sweeney, GartnerGroup's international e-business research director, said: 'I think Microsoft is doing some very aggressive things. It's classic of Microsoft. Having embedded the Media Player in Windows-based handheld computing devices is a very smart thing to do. It's propagating its operating system to virtually everywhere.'

Microsoft is also involved in the Secure Digital Music Initiative, which groups more than 100 recording industry and technology heavyweights - among them AT&T, America Online and IBM - and wants to establish a viable standard that will stem the widespread music piracy as a result of the misuse of MP3 technology.

Mr Rowsell-Jones said: 'The stakes are much higher this time. We are talking about the format of digital music and Microsoft would do everything in its power to make its WMA the industry standard.'

Mr Rowsell-Jones and Mr Sweeney said most digital music delivery standards were still in the development stage and commercial digital delivery of music was not expected until the end of this year. The Gartner analysts said it was only a matter of time before WMA became the standard for digital music.

According to Jupiter Communications research, MP3 will continue dominating the digital music landscape this year.

The firm said MP3 usage would remain widespread until a better format emerged that supported public encoding and music swapping - issues that Microsoft wanted to tackle with its WMA initiative.



'Microsoft is doing some very aggressive things'