The new Zune software – the one that supports Zune HD – is a slow, hulking dinosaur. Installing it on my computer at work took forever, and actually using it is a pain.
On the other hand, there’s now a new feature called Smart DJ that is absolutely amazing. Essentially, it’s Pandora on crack: Zune software plays music related to a particular artist and adjusts its suggestions based on your preferences. The cool thing is that all the song that it plays are available on the Zune Pass, meaning that if I hear an artist I like, I can download a crap-ton of their albums instantly.
Once again, this goes to show that while iTunes is for people who like songs, Zune Pass is for people who like music. There’s quite a debate raging online about which model is better, the concept of buying music (iTunes) or renting it (Zune Pass). Here’s my opinion and why the Zune Pass is right for me (bullet list time!):
- Zune Pass (ZP, abbreviated to save me a few keystrokes) is 14.95$ per month
- iTunes songs are ~1$ each
- I can download and listen to an unlimited number of songs under the ZP
- For the same price (per month), I could only listen to 15 songs with iTunes
- Let’s say I download about 4 new albums every week (on average, this is probably a much lower figure than reality). If each album is 12 songs, that’s 48 songs per week, 205 songs per month (30/7*48), 2,496 songs per year (52*48).
- If I use the ZP for a year, I will have paid 180$.
- If I use the ZP for 10 years (highly unlikely, right?), I will have paid 1,800$
- In a year, for the same price, I can listen to 2500 songs with the ZP or 180 with iTunes
For me, as I am still figuring out what music I like and all (shit, I just realized that I love Pink Floyd and their “Dark Side of the Moon” is (so far) my favorite album of all time), the option to listen to an unlimited number of songs, all for a veeeeery reasonable sum of 180$ a year, is a no-brainer. Maybe if I was stuck in my ways and knew that there are only 15 new songs I wanted every month, and never experimented with music at all, the iTunes approach would be perfect. But that’s not me.
I don’t care about owning music. I’m not one of those people who needs to have their CD collection in neat rows on a book-shelf. I need my music flying through my ears! Yeah, if M$ goes under, I’ll lose all that music. But then, if M$ goes belly-up, I’ve got more important shit to worry about. Like finding another job. But I digress. If I really like some of the music (once again, Pink Floyd), and need it after the ZP is gone, I’ll go out and buy it. Or steal it. Whatever. But I’m not going to constrict my options now to just be able to say that I own a Britney Spears album. The hell with that.
EDIT-
I forgot to mention yet another approach to the Zune Pass: with the Zune Pass is included the option to keep 10 songs every month. At the rate of 1$/song, this translates to you buying 10 songs a month and paying 5$ to rent an unlimited number of songs. So, let’s consider a hypothetical power-listener (buys 1000 songs a month) named Max. Max can use Zune or iTunes, since the cost (1$/song) is the same for either service. If Max also gets a Zune Pass and is smart, in a given month he will buy 990 songs and use the 10-song credit from Zune Pass to get the other 10 songs: the cost is 1,005$, compared to 1,000$ for iTunes. But, for that extra 5$ Max gets to try as many songs as he wants. In essence, he can listen to 10,000 songs and choose to buy only a tenth of that, all for an extra 5$ a month.
But enough of this non-sense, sleep calls.
September 27, 2009 at 1:18 pm
So I tried out zune pass as well last week.
Though I agree with your analysis as it meets your needs, personally I still think there’s flaws in it.
My biggest issue was availability of music. There were several things I wanted to listen to that zp finds but lists as unavailable. It’s annoying, and ruins the “all music available instantly” image. And then there’s the lots of other songs that it just doesn’t find.
The other, which is possibly due to my lack of skill, is that the SmartDJ only makes about a 2-hour playlist, and half the songs in it are again unavailable. I also didn’t find a way to add new artists/songs to the same mix, as you can with pandora.
And a pet peeve: the ui of the desktop client is a bit bizarre and takes some getting used to. Intuitive is not a word I would use to describe it. For bonus points: the ui of the website is entirely distinct from the ui of the client.
however, when it does work, it’s pretty sweet. What I’d really want to have is to have all music available everywhere (home, office, car, cell phone) and for that I would gladly pay $15/mo. But we’re not there yet so I’ll stick to buying cds and listening to radio.
October 2, 2009 at 1:09 am
You’re absolutely right, availability is a big problem. But, from my viewpoint, it’s an issue for music that I know about. I know The Beatles and Led Zeppelin exist, but ZP says they don’t. That sucks. On the other hand, if I don’t discover (I use the service to discover new music, mostly) a particular group that’s not on the ZP, I don’t know what I’m missing. For the music that I do know about, like Beatles and Zeppelin, I find “alternative sources”.
Hmm, I haven’t had an instance where the SmartDJ had unavailable songs in it. Maybe I’ve just been lucky so far. It does play some of the songs that I have locally, like the Beatles stuff that’s obviously not available from ZP. So far, I’ve had a very good experience with the SmartDJ. Right, SmartDJ isn’t the same as Pandora’s stations, so far it’s just based on the single artist for which you start it. That’s a limitation, sure, but I find myself hopping around: start with an artist, load up SmartDJ, listen to some songs, hear something I like, download an album of their more popular stuff, maybe start SmartDJ from them, etc.
The UI sucks, but it’s one hell of an improvement over the old version. And that’s saying something.
Well, you can use the ZP on three computers. I have it installed on my mail computer and on my laptop, that way I have my music at work and wherever I go. Maybe if we release some sort of a Zune-phone it’ll have the ZP on there. Now that’ll be an iPhone killer.
October 2, 2009 at 1:14 am
I agree it’s more of an issue for things you know about but I wouldn’t say discoverability is that great because of the issues with smartDj in the second point. A one artist seed is not narrow enough to give me good suggestions.
The pre-set channels they have were pretty good though.
seriously? how crappy was the old ui? I don’t even want to imagine that.
no reason this couldn’t be a win-mo app. pandora is.
October 2, 2009 at 1:26 am
I guess I’m OK with limited discoverability as long as (a) I hear music that I like and (b) I don’t know what I’m missing. Obviously not for everyone, but I’m happy so far.
Yeah, one artist is probably not enough, so try skipping from one to the next?
The old UI was incredibly slow. I think it was synchronous, where it actually waited for server response before continuing. So if you were searching for something, it would ping the server for possible searches and show them to you, but while that was happening you couldn’t keep typing. Now, it’s async, so everything is much faster.
Pandora on phones is simply running Flash, right? Zune is about DRM and stuff, not sure what exactly would be involved with that, not to mention the cross-platform programming, which Pandora gets for free because it’s Flash.
October 2, 2009 at 1:33 am
skipping isn’t the same as having one station that has two seeds, since ideally, the new music it adds should have features of both seeds, not just either seed. I actually think pandora could do this better as well. Sometimes it gets it right, sometimes it goes off on wild tangents.
ah so it was outlook. I see
I think so yes. but can’t silverlight magically solve everything? kcls manages to have ebooks expire. it can’t be that hard. why cross-platform? promote the windows ecosystem; at least to start.
October 2, 2009 at 1:44 am
This calls for more SmartDJ experimenting. Good thing that I’m back in town now and will actually have time to do so.
Yeah, it really sucked. Except, unlike Outlook, there was no way to cancel the action.
Silverlight is mighty powerful, but can it handle Zune? No one knows.
Even though Windows Mobile is still Windows, the application has to be rewritten. I’ve been playing around with the SDK and there is a fair amount of the C# language that simply isn’t available on the mobile platform, which does mean that you can’t just flip a bit in a sources file somewhere and have the new binaries ready. So, even though it’s close, you’re still technically cross-platform, even if the platforms share a common base name.