Don't want a flame war, but...

Today I was amused to see an article on Gizmodo about the Zune and what turns out to be a somewhat gimped wifi feature. For those who don't know, I work as a Mac Specialist (sales and general wealth of knowledge person) at the "local" Apple Store, so if you want to write this off as fanboy / biased banter you're welcome to but I would like to think of myself as non-partial to a platform or product because of any brand loyalty, I just get what I think is the best product due to the information that's available to me.

For example, I loved my PS2 and I currently love my 360 and I'd like to love a PS3 but Sony just isn't demonstrating anything that says to me that they care about gaming so much as making a consumer product that's going to get Blu-Ray into as many hands as possible and make all age groups want to buy for multimedia functionality. Once there are great games available and a kick-ass online service in place, I'll likely want one again.

Speaking back to my employment again, under NDA I'm not allowed to disclose any information in any blog post ever about Apple products, even if I'm simply stating fact. I could possibly be fired even if I were to copy and paste information directly from the Apple site in here just to make sure people are aware of a product or service. So likely you won't see any posts about that kind of thing, sadly. Similarly, I'm not supposed to badmouth competitor's products, so I'm simply going to try to put forth the facts here.

That being said, the Zune article caught me a bit off guard and made me wonder about a couple things. For those who don't know, the 'Social' that Microsoft has been promoting as one of the big features of the Zune can be a bit of a wall flower at times. The process of 'squirting', or transferring music files from one Zune to another over wifi, is supposed to be a way for new and emerging artists to get some exposure, share some of your favorite music with friends or general people, or help make music reach a bigger audience in a way that those 30 second clips on various online music stores can't. Initially there might be a concern over rights management and copyright infringement, but the tracks are wrapped in a widely criticized DRM protocol that will limit listers to 3 plays or 3 days, whichever comes first, and there's no way of pulling songs that have been 'squirted' to you onto your computer, hacks aside. Another bit of history, and seemingly unrelated, for every Zune that is purchased for $249 ERP, $1 is paid by MS to Universal Music, who states they feel an MP3 player is an electronic device filled with pirated music and the deal with MS is to help counter money lost on file sharing.

Seems like most everyone is a winner here, artists get free exposure and record labels don't lose money to file distribution, but instead have people in theory flocking to the Zune Marketplace to purchase the music they've just heard. This isn't exactly true, as the Gizmodo article tells us there are certain artists from certain record labels that are not allowed to be 'squirted' to another Zune. Sony is blocking Beyonce, Weird Al and Ciara, while Universal is blocking Gwen Stefani, Eminem, Blue October, Snow Patrol, JoJo and Jay-Z. Say, wasn't Universal the company that's getting $1 from every Zune sale to counter file sharing? Why yes, in fact, they are. So why is it that a company getting monetary damage control is forbidding you from sharing music that is heavily DRM'ed so that in no more than 3 days is going to be wiped from your MP3 player? What exactly is it that your $1 is doing for you?


What happens when (begin speculation) all other music companies hold out their hands saying "me too" and each pulling $1 for each sale? There are quite a few labels out there and that makes for quite a few $1's. Let's just say for the sake of argument that there are 50. That's $50. Does anyone believe MS is going to just eat that money so that people can continue to purchase the Zune for $249? I doubt it, especially if what I've heard is true and MS is already selling the Zune at a loss to compete in the market. So guess where that leads us: the price of the Zune is going to increase to be able to appease all the label executives and prevent anyone from jumping ship to another online distribution site who will pay. So you very well could be paying an extra $50 for an MP3 player that has a feature that you can't even fully utilize because even though you're compensating for any file sharing that may or may not be happening (and especially if you're not the person who actually is downloading illegal music). My personal feeling is that if you're paying compensation money, you'd better have full usage rights to all music of that company. I find this to be a bad situation. Anyone in agreement?