| Zune and PlaysForSure much ado about nothing |
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| by Stan Beer | |
| Monday, 18 September 2006 | |
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All I keep hearing is "but that's what Apple does with iPod". Well actually that's not what Apple does with iPod. According to the latest figures, there are about 60 million iPods in the market and about 1.5 billion iTunes downloads to date. That makes an average of 25 iTunes tracks per iPod. Where did all the other hundreds of tracks that people have on their iPods come from? Aside from tracks downloaded from the illegal file sharing marketplace and legally ripped from purchased CDs, you can bet your bottom dollar that quite a few tracks on iPod will have been also ripped from CDs after having been burned from a PlaysForSure download. The fact is that most of the music on iPods today was not purchased through iTunes. However, much of that non-iTunes music was purchased legally. Therefore what the market is saying to music companies, the computer companies and the music download sites is if we pay good money to buy music legally from you, we'll play it on whatever device we damn well please. Now back to Microsoft. If the company tried to cut itself off from the rest of music playing world by making its Zune players only compatible with music bought through its Zune Marketplace store, new Zune owners would find themselves with precious little to fill their 30GB hard drives. It is almost a given that most of the music on Zunes, like on iPods, will come from other sources than its own music store. Most of it will be ripped from CDs. Some of those CDs will have been burned from PlaysForSure downloads. It is quite right that Microsoft says now that Zune will not be directly compatible with PlaysForSure downloads from sites like Napster. Most portable music player owners who don't have an iPod will find that policy repugnant. They already own a heap of music tracks that they've bought through Microsoft's own DRM and now the company is telling them that its new player won't play them? I don't think so! My bet is that Microsoft will offer PlaysForSure music owners a way to get their content onto Zune other than burning and ripping CDs even if it's only a one-off offer. As for music going from Zune to PlaysForSure devices, well I guess it's RIP.
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  written by Peter Krantz, May 06, 2008
Or, Microsoft could just kill the PlaysForSure DRM servers without making much noise. Maybe we should just give them our money and hope for the best.
written by Mark Mattington, May 07, 2008
Is this author retarded?
Apparently its true, ANYONE can get a blog these days. written by anonymous, May 07, 2008
Telling it as it (demonstrably) is (not). Who is full of baloney now?
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And after following that simple ten-step procedure, it won't "play for sure."
This is all about Microsoft talking business partners into adopting a standard that was supposed to make things a) EASILY b) interoperable _for average users._ The idea is that all Internet music stores should adopt the PlaysForSure standard, secure in the knowledge that they will then be able to sell content to users of most Windows-based .mp3 players.
"Sell" here means enter your credit card number once, click as impulse guides you on the site, wait for a progress bar to fill, and play the music... "for sure," or that was the idea.
Meanwhile, Microsoft was secretly working on their own product, which doesn't comply with the PlaysForSure standard, and can't _easily_ be used to purchase content from any site who was foolish enough to drink the PlaysForSure Kool-aid.
This is a big deal, and a major betrayal of Microsoft's business partners. It's comparable to the days when Microsoft told everyone else to develop for OS/2 while secretly doing all their major development for Windows... and when Windows 3.0 was released, would you believe it, Microsoft just happened to have a six-to-twelve-month lead over the competition in Windows applications.
It won't matter much to the average consumer because PlaysForSure was about as successful as Microsoft Bob, but it does matter to Microsoft's business partners.