Samsung hope for great things from Milk; mostly milk money

Samsung have created a Pandora-like app for users in America, which has managed a bit over a third of a million downloads since launch last month.

Samsung are quite excited about these numbers, given that it's handset-tied and so not swimming in a vast pool of available users. On the other hand, nobody with a great story to tell obsesses about the number of times an app has been downloaded - akin to selling a house and focusing on the dozens of viewings you had rather than the price you finally obtained.

The other strange smell coming from Milk is that, at the moment, it's a free service without ads, but that doesn't appear to be the long-term plan, with ads and a premium tier coming, inevitably, later on.

The Next Web speculates that this might suggest Samsung sees Milk as a product which will stretch beyond Samsung owners. Because why concentrate on giving your user base a great experience when you could try and cram yourself into an already painfully overcrowded market, eh?

Samsung plots iTunes killer; world mutters "really? that's nice, dear"

Samsung have become the latest company to burn through cash thinking that the way to defeat iTunes is to create something pretty similar to iTunes.

Oh, hang on though, Samsung think they've got a USP:

If that sounds limiting, Kang says Samsung is working to get it to as many places as possible - including Samsung's audio docks and its fridge range, allowing you to manage your music listening while you get a cold glass of milk.

Oh, god, it's the annual return of the internet-connected fridge, whereby people who know better suggest the world is waiting for their fridges to do more than keep the sodding cheese fresh.

Samsung want people to pay ten quid a month for the service; if people didn't already have a massive stack of digital music they'd already paid for, maybe they might. But as it is? They won't.

Samsung have a plan

Samsung thinks it knows how to hurt Apple: it's bought mSpot, a not-quite-Spotify clone, with the idea of - naturally - killing iTunes.

There's a couple of problems with this. First, mSpot doesn't really hold a suite of rights that would currently make it a viable option, so bringing it up to standard is going to cost.

Secondly, Samsung is really only interested in selling tech, so why is it getting caught up running a music-streaming service at all? Nokia's nightmare with ComesWithMusic shows that it's a difficult path to take, and doesn't really seem to have much impact on the core business one way or another.

iTunes was vital to the success of the iPod; I'm not so sure that Apple would have bothered overmuch with creating it for the iPhone.