Listen! Hear that bell? That means the gloves are off and the real fight begins now. BuyMusic.com, Rhapsody, WalMart, even Napster were all lightweights in the tussle for digital music market share; molest us not with this pocket calculator stuff. But now the iTunes Music Store finally has some real competition, because last night Microsoft took the wraps off its own iTMS clone. Ladies and gentlemen, cower in fear before the Microsoft Online Music Store, otherwise known as... MOMS.

Well, okay, technically Microsoft appears just to be calling it "MSN Music," but MOMS is being tossed around as a far less bland alternative in the MacRumors Forums, and we're hoping it sticks-- the service is still a beta (er, "preview"), after all. Whatever the name turns out to be when the real service launches in October, though, you just have to admire the sheer nerve it takes for Microsoft to pretend that MOMS has nothing whatsoever to do with the iTMS; MSN's corporate veep actually denied to the Seattle Times that MOMS was a reaction to Apple's music download service, saying: "We definitely would have done this on our own. We were on a path already to provide great music services and so the Apple effort didn't really change what we would have done." So it's a complete and total coincidence that, like the iTMS, MOMS has 99-cent songs, $9.99 albums, free song previews, single-click purchasing, and (soon) a catalog of over one million songs. And, as faithful viewer loa bacon points out, "New Music Tuesdays." Nope, MOMS clearly wasn't influenced by the iTMS in any way at all.

Indeed, how could it have been, since the iTMS apparently never existed in the first place? Faithful viewer Miche Doherty notes a CBS MarketWatch article (found via MacMinute) in which the same MSN veep announces that Microsoft's goal with MOMS is "to finally bring digital music to the masses by offering what we believe is the largest and highest quality catalog of legal music on the Internet." Oh, thank heaven somebody's doing that! And what a stroke of luck for us all that it's the Grand Innovator of Redmond.

Seriously, to the masses? Which masses do you suppose this joker's talking about? Because when last we checked, Windows users could use iTunes just fine, and in fact since MOMS isn't Mac-compatible (big shock, we know) or even available for use in any browser other than Internet Explorer 5.01 or later for Windows, it sounds to us like Apple's got the service for "the masses," relatively speaking. Maybe by "masses" the veep meant the majority of users with portable music players, since he was careful to note that the MOMS catalog is "available on the broadest selection of portable devices." Except that while MOMS downloads are allegedly compatible with 70-odd players on the market, they aren't playable on the iPod-- which is in the hands of the more people out there than those other 70 players combined. "To the masses" indeed.

By the way, isn't it fun hearing Microsoft whine about the iPod and "consumer choice" to its customers just like Real does-- especially when its service, like Real's, isn't even Mac-compatible? Faithful viewer Jonathan notes that Microsoft originally even instructed its customers to burn CDs of MOMS songs and then re-rip them into iTunes in order to transfer the music to an iPod; that advice has since been removed, either because Microsoft realized that it was advising its customers to violate its own terms of service or because it realized that there aren't many people stupid enough to jump through those hoops instead of just buying their music through iTunes in the first place.

Anyway, we can't test MOMS itself, not being Windows-enabled (yes, cry for us why don't you); we can only look at it and note that it strikes us as a pared-down iTMS clone run backwards through a tree-shredder and then painted with two coats of Sherwin-Williams SuperPaint Interior flat latex in shade #3442, "Ugly and In Denial." But faithful viewer Brett Chaffer pointed us toward a fairly extensive review over at Mac360 which manages to give us a headache just by describing the setup process. Apparently just getting the store running in the first place requires downloading and installing an ActiveX control in addition to the Windows Media Player 10 Technical Beta, because as of yet MOMS runs in IE and passes downloaded songs off to WMP, which all sounds about as cumbersome and irritating as we'd expect a Microsoft product or service to be. And for all that, all you get is a way to search for songs and buy them-- MOMS currently lacks all of the frills that make the iTMS such a joy, like gift certificates, celebrity playlists, free downloads, music videos, customer iMixes, etc. Heck, from what we can tell, there isn't even a "Browse" mode.

In other words, based solely on its reported merits (what few there are), we'd never in a million years consider MOMS to be a viable threat to the iTMS's market position; unfortunately, MOMS is a Microsoft service, which means that as long as fewer than 12% of the population actually die from using it, it's good enough to survive by monopoly power alone. Remember, now that Windows XP Service Pack 2 has turned Auto-Update on by default, at some point in October, gazillions of Windows users will awake to find that they've been upgraded to Windows Media Player 10 overnight-- with a handy reminder to give MOMS a whirl, no doubt. iTunes may be preloaded on every Compaq and Hewlett-Packard consumer PC sold, but it's still not going to have the built-in automatic captive audience of MOMS, which the vast majority of Windows users will probably default to using "because it's there."

Consider this: if you think Internet Explorer sucks now, we're telling you it was practically lethal until version 4, and yet it has something like 90ish percent of the market. Are we about to witness a repeat performance? You bet-- maybe not right away, but maybe in a couple of years unless Apple keeps on its toes. Ah, the Wintel Market: Where Half-Assed Is Good Enough™.