Last.FM and CES
So I, along with everyone else who owns a Zune, was disappointed that Bill Gates didn’t announce any upcoming news really for the Zune. I was hoping for maybe some hints at when they would be adding either podcasting or video downloads to the Zune Marketplace. I have heard some rumors around the net though that a podcast client is going to be added this month. That would be awesome! It’s really not that hard to get podcast content onto the Zune since I just have it monitor my iTunes folder and just catalog whatever content it finds there. Still, it would be nice to have it integrated into the Zune player itself. Speaking of the marketplace though, why is all of the rap content being highlighted? Do that many Zune listeners really download Bow Wow? I would imagine that the only people buying Zunes right now are more on the nerdy side than the hip hop gangsta side. Hmm, it would be nice to maybe see some customizing of the main page so that it tracked your favorites and made suggestions. For how much the Zune is supposed to be a “Welcome to the Social” thing there are a lot of cool features they could add that aren’t there now. Speaking of which, I have signed up for last.fm and started playing around with that. I still like Pandora better for just how amazingly awesome the whole Music Genome project is but I really like the last.fm player and the way it grabs a more focused variety of music to sample for you. Pandora sometimes would grab the most random obscure things to the point of frustration. If I want to listen to Dave Matthews, I don’t want Pandora to pull up some random Sufjan Stevens track, I want to hear Dave or John Meyer or Jack Johnson. I typed in Regina Spektor into last.fm and it started playing Deathcab, The Decemberists, Spoon, and Damien Rice, much more what I was looking for. I still want new stuff, I’m finding the deeper I get into indie music the harder it is to find places that give airtime to some of the best groups out there (a la The Weepies). It would be really nice to see the Zune Marketplace start offering user playlists like the iTunes store does.
In other Zune news, Cnet posted about the Zune being a stab in the back to marketers of Microsoft’s Playsforsure technology. I had forgotten about reading the post until I saw someone else who was blogging about it. The way I see it, maybe Microsoft is abandoning PFS but it’s not like they haven’t given it ample time to catch on. If Napster, Yahoo, Rhapsody, and Musicmatch can’t be bothered to take sizable market share from Apple after how many years of being around I think it is time for a new approach. Although, I have to admit it would have been nice to see the Zune just support PFS so that it would be comparable with all the other services out there. I’m not going to complain too much though, the only other subscription service I would have any interest in is eMusic and run theirs really weird. For $15/month, I’ll stick with the 2 million songs in the Zune Marketplace.
