It was inevitable: BetaNews says that MTV is going to announce tomorrow that they're abandoning the Microsoft co-developed Urge and jumping ship to Real's Rhapsody. They cite the Zune as the primary reason for it's failure, which I find really ironic, because compared to Urge, the Zune Marketplace's giant sucking sound is deafening.
If this is true, and I were Microsoft, I'd take this as a prime opportunity to buy the Urge code back from MTV and use it to replace the Zune Marketplace software. Then they could turn the Zune Marketplace into a skin for WMP, to fool people into thinking it is an "Integrated" experience, and also allow people to use the stand-alone WMP11 to interact with the Zune if they so choose.
Otherwise, the only good thing to come out of the arrangement would have been The Killers concert that MTV and Microsoft put on at PURE at Caesar's Palace.
I wonder what will happen with all the music that people bought off Urge. Will they screw their users, like Google just did? Or will they get to keep using their tracks? Only time (and maybe tomorrow's announcement) will tell.
UPDATE: Looks like MTV grafted the Urge flash app into Real's Rhapsody app. So much for that idea.