Microsoft Preparing Music Streaming for the Xbox 360

Microsoft seems to be committed to releasing a new music streaming service and one of the targeted platforms is said to be the Xbox 360 home gaming console. The company has begun to talk about the new service and the planned launch date is somewhere in late July.

Peter Bale, who is an executive producer for the software giant, told the Telegraph newspaper in the United Kingdom that “Music is an important area for Microsoft. We are looking at launching a music streaming service imminently.” He also unveiled the fact that the new, unnamed service “will be a similar principle to Spotify, but we are still examining how the business model will work.”

For a service that will apparently be released very soon for both the Zune player and the Xbox 360, Microsoft sure doesn't know a lot of things about it. There's no mention of what amount of songs will be offered or whether any options will be delivered to also download a song you like and own it for a certain price.

There's no talk on what areas of the world will be able to enjoy the new music streaming service and whether Microsoft is ready to offer it to all owners of its gaming console or only to those who pay to get the Xbox Live Gold subscription level. It would certainly be nice to get some free, ad-supported music to the masses.

At the E3 trade conference, Microsoft emphasized the social aspect of its device by announcing that Xbox Live Gold members would get access to Last.fm, a popular music streaming service that already had a lot of users on the PC and Mac. It's not clear how Microsoft plans to make sure that its service does not directly compete with Last.fm. Such questions will probably be addressed when the official release date is announced.