Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft but these opinions are my own, yada, yada. And I have nothing to do with the Zune team.
Here's the short version - paying a low monthly fee and being able to download as many songs as you want is killer. I've downloaded over 1000 songs just in my first week and I'm going strong. And the 'social' works.
ZunePass is the Zune's subscription service. You pay $14.99 per month and you can download any number of songs from the Zune marketplace. Since it is a subscription service, you lose access to the songs once you stop paying the monthly fee. Sounds DRM (it is) and evil, doesn't it? Not quite.
I'm staunchly anti-DRM. And I'm a huge fan of Apple's devices. I did all my music shopping on Amazon's MP3 store and listened to all my songs on my iPhone. When Mel Sampat asked to get a Zune, saying that it will change my life, I thought he was joking. But Mel was persistent and I went and got myself a red Zune 80 custom engraved from Zune Originals. I will post a review on the device soon but I wanted to talk about ZunePass and the Zune software first.
Exploring is a lot easier
Buying songs on Amazon/iTunes is cheap but not free. I bought a lot of songs but I would buy them only if I really wanted them. I would rarely take a chance on an unknown artist or song or album.
With ZunePass, since I'm not paying per song, I find myself spending several hours randomly browsing through the Zune marketplace. I'm trying out *way* more artists and songs. Example? Someone on the internal Zune mailing list gave a thumbs up to William Shatner's (yes - *that* William Shatner) 'Has Been'. That's an album I would have never risked money on - but guess what - it's actually quite nice.
The closest analogy I can come to the exploring I do is how we browse through Wikipedia - where you click on an article and find yourself reading a totally unrelated article a couple of hours later.
If the Zune marketplace gains popularity, I'm willing to bet that we would see some interesting changes in how artists become popular. When you have to pay nothing to try out a new artist or a new album, it removes ton of 'impedance'.
Finding rare songs
I went crazy this morning on ZunePass downloading old Tamil and Hindi movie songs from ZunePass. My Tamilian readers will understand why I'm so excited about getting songs from movies like 'Mr.Bharath' or Duet or more recent movies like Bombay. The selection of world music, atleast the Indian section, is quite deep and is very up-to-date.
I can hear a lot of folks (especially all my college friends reading this post) saying "You already get this from Bittorrent". Apart from the legal aspect and quality aspect, you're going to have a lot of trouble finding seeds for rare or unpopular content.
Under the right circumstances, DRM isn't so bad
There. I said the unthinkable. Here are the limits the Zune DRM puts on you
- You can listen to your music on three given machines at any time, For me, that's my home machine, my work machine and my laptop. I stream content from my home machine (over UPnP) to my XBox 360 hooked up to my home theater system.
- You can take it on your Zune device if you have one
- You lose access to your music once you stop paying the subscription fee. Of course, if you wanted to, there's an option to buy the song outright as well (ala iTunes or Amazon's mp3 store)
I've been using it for a week now and I don't find any of it limiting. The biggest blocker for a lot of people will be lack of native Mac or Linux support but I guess Parallels/Bootcamp/Fusion can help out in that regard. Another big blocker is that these songs don't work with iPods - so you'll have to listen to these songs from your computer alone or get a Zune. As I've found out in the last one week, the new Zunes aren't bad at all.
This made me think - is all DRM evil? Without DRM, there's really only one business model - buying each song or album. DRM, *implemented correctly*, lets you 'rent' content and doesn't necessarily mean a bad user experience. I have a feeling that there are a lot of people out there who will be happier with the renting model (due to the dramatically lower prices) for some forms of content.
'The social' works
Finding songs and artists to listen to based on what your friends are listening turns out to be an exceptionally good model. In my case, a lot of my friends are doing the same sort of exploration I talked about above so I get to reap the benefits of their effort. At the top of this post, you can see my Zune card with a live updated list of the songs I listen to, my favorites, etc.
It's incredibly cheap
I've already downloaded over 1000 songs in the short time I've had a Zune. I'm sure I'm going to get several thousand more over the next year or so. Paying $1 or so per song for thousands of songs would be *very expensive* when compared to paying a flat $15 for per month .
