Welcome to the Social Part 2
While exploring my various favorite weblogs, I came across this article over at Gizmodo.
It seems especially appropriate as an addendum to my previous post about the nature of the Zune advertising scheme.
Microsoft Zune propaganda welcomes you to the social, but that’s only about a 58% welcome, because sites around the blogosphere are noticing that around 42% of the songs they’re trying to share Zune-to-Zune are on the “Zune sharing prohibited” list. Even that three days/3 plays DRM slapped on every shared song is not enough for those moneygrubbing and paranoid record labels.
Out of 50 songs tested by Zunerama, Universal and Sony artists were the most represented on the prohibited list. That’s particularly frustrating when you recall that sweetheart deal that Universal Music Group and Microsoft dreamed up for the Zune, making everybody pay through the nose for the right to share Universal’s music on the Zune.
Suddenly the Zune becomes more and more untrue to the brand advertising that Microsoft has set up for it. In fact, I would see this as false advertising and the broken trust further degrades my willingness to purchase a Microsoft product. If I were a Zune owner, I’d be rather angered by this revelation as the core “value” of the machine is suddenly limited.
At first I thought the issue was just affecting ZunePass users, but then I read this over at Zune Thoughts:
I decided to do a test myself to see if the 50% figure had any truth to it. Since I don’t have a Zune Pass account (and can’t without a credit card billed to a US address), my test is limited in scope and should be taken with a grain of salt. I purchased eight songs from the Zune Marketplace Top 30 Songs (most from the Top 10), selected from various genres, and tacked on two KT Tunstall songs for good measure for a total of ten songs, nine of them from different artists. I then created a “quick list” on the Zune (the dusty white one) that had the synchronized songs and tried to share the songs with my other Zune (the dysfunctional black one). The results? Of the eight Top 30 songs, only five were allowed to be shared - that’s a 38% failure rate. If you factor in the two KT Tunstall songs, seven of the total ten songs were shared successfully (a slightly better 30% failure rate).
On the other hand, Tycho seemed quite happy with his choice despite not being able to use the function. And as one blogger writes, “Some As underwhelming as the 58% is, I need to remind myself… that figure is still 58% higher than would have been possible on any of today’s iPods. This is a groundbreaking music sharing approach, and it will only get better from here.”
However, I think the key issue at hand is that Microsoft established a base idea of what the Zune can do and the end result has been much less than satisfactory. I know we are all trapped by DRM, but if you can’t share all your music, don’t focus your campaign around it and hope people won’t find out!
