The Ship’s Going Down Fast

More Zune fallout:

Zune Sinks- Forbes

The new Zune Marketplace is even stupider. Microsoft is trying to break open Apple’s near monopoly of the music market, so they’re launching an online music store that competes with iTunes. The only difference here is that iTunes is simple, elegant, and intuitive. The Zune Marketplace seems like the polar opposite. It has fewer songs. No audiobooks or podcasts. It doesn’t sell movies or TV shows. And if you actually want to buy a song, you’ve got to lay out big chunks of cash and jump through more hoops than a circus lion. Get a load of this passage from Walt Mossberg’s Journal review:

“To buy even a single 99-cent song from the Zune store, you have to purchase blocks of “points” from Microsoft, in increments of at least $5. You can’t just click and have the 99 cents deducted from a credit card, as you can with iTunes. You must first add points to your account, then buy songs with these points. So, even if you are buying only one song, you have to allow Microsoft, one of the world’s richest companies, to hold on to at least $4.01 of your money until you buy another. And the point system is deceptive. Songs are priced at 79 points, which some people might think means 79 cents. But 79 points actually cost 99 cents.”

Don’t feel bad if you have to go back and read that a few times before it makes sense –I know I did. Buying music from Microsoft seems awkward, over-complicated, and designed from the bottom up to squeeze every last cent out of the consumer.

Tune Into Zune? by Steven Levy (Newsweek)

What’s more, when I tried to send a Rolling Stones song I just bought on the Zune Marketplace to another Zune, I got a message reading, “Can’t receive songs because of rights restrictions.” Huh? Microsoft says that in a minority of cases it was unable to secure artist rights for even this limited form of sharing, and that’s the message you get when you try to send songs from those holdouts. Seems to me that when you buy those non-sharable songs from the Zune Marketplace you should be warned about this. But Microsoft says that they have no plans to give you that information, even if it makes you look like an idiot when you waste a friend’s time by trying to send a song and getting only that insulting error message.

Full Disclosure: Levy’s book The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness is in my Top Ten Books of 2006

Ok, so it looks like the Zune player is being plauged by setbacks and detractors- on its launch day!!! However, let me say two things.

1) I like the choice to add the color brown. Every article has been overly critical of this palete choice. I say good move.

2) It does look pretty. The Newsweek article had a great picture:

The Social is a tough place. Better bring you’re A game.