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September 14, 2006
Zuner or later
More details about Zune yesterday.
“What does the Zune use the built-in WiFi for? Why, Zune-to-Zune sharing of music, of course. You can give your friend a song from your Zune and they can play it 3 times over 3 days, and then they get the option of purchasing the track (if it is available on the Zune Marketplace, which is the iTunes Store for Zunes).”
There’s also a short article in Seattle Weekly this week that describes this a bit more:
“It’s about being online and sharing your favorite playlist—at the school cafeteria and on the ski lift,” says [Microsoft’s] Stephenson, alluding to an online store, like iTunes, that will be connected to Zune. In the near future, Microsoft plans to add broadcasting functions, so Zune users can act as DJs, allowing random, nearby users of the device to tune in to what they are playing— or specifying their broadcasts for a select group of users.
Maybe it’d be nice to easily “borrow” a song from a friend, but is it really so much better than how you’d do it now that you’d be willing to put up with poorer battery life and the inevitable connectivity annoyances? (“Heather’s Zune is trying to connect, do you really want to allow this?”) And if I had files I didn’t want to share, I’d have to bother flagging them as private? I somehow don’t think kids in the school cafeteria have much trouble learning about and getting hold of new music easily.
And walking down the street or sitting on a bus browsing other peoples’ music collections has always struck me as a design exercise, not an evident need. Anyway, randomly sampling music is already easy: turn on the radio. I want more thoughfully curated suggestions, not fewer.
There are certainly ways the iTunes/iPod combination could do social music sharing in similar or better ways even without Wi-fi. Sharing can be asyncrhonous and still be useful: let me subscribe to iMix playlists that contain the short preview tracks from iTMS. I could listen to those playlists, then choose stuff from it I’d like to be buy next time I sync.
Posted by Andrew at September 14, 2006 03:32 PM
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