From a simple marketing standpoint, would you rather buy online music from a store that looks like this:

or this:

I know MSN's store is just a Beta but this is the music business. It's all about marketing. MSN's site is like the generic brand music store which I'm sure might appeal to some but surely not tech savvy people willing to lay down their hard earned scratch for the latest Cake album. Sure Microsoft has the advantage of a captive audience of, I don't know, a billion or so Windows drones but I mean captive like they've got you by the short hairs and they're not even trying anymore. When I first heard that Microsoft was launcing a music store to compete with iTunes I was a little worried but the recent statistics show that the iTunes Music Store show no signs of slowing down. The iTunes store recently announced it's 125,000,000th song sold. So by extrapolating, iTunes started out by selling 25 million songs every 231 days, then every 91 days, then 73, 62 and the latest count - 25 million in 52 days. Either iTunes is gaining in popularity or Apple has figured out how to speed up the whole space-time continuum thing.

The MSN music store will surely take a bite out of the online music sales pie, but I'm not as worried as I once was.