Opportunity Missed – Music Rising


Trying to get the U2/Green Day Song From Music Rising .orgSo U2 and Green Day performed an amazing original collaboration last night on Monday Night Football in the first game at the refurbushed Super Dome in New Orleans last night. This morning I went to download it, first checking iTunes – nope, not there. I then remembered the URL they were promoting during the game, http://www.musicrising.org/ to find out it was being distributed via Rhapsody, which does not run on Macs. When I tried to download the song and give them my $0.99, I got this message.

This is why standards and interoperability is important. How many tens of thousands of dollars did this worthy non-profit leave on the table by choosing a technology partner who was incapable of serving people like me. How many hundreds of thousands of dollars did they leave on the table from people who would not download and install the software?

I had thought this sort of bait for proprietary systems had gone the way of the dodo, but I guess some people never learn…

[ESPN isn’t much better since they made it impossible to directly link to their coverage of this portion of the game, the closes link I could find is here, where you will need to click on the Music Rising link to get some video of what transpired.]