Digital Content. . . GRR. . Argghhh. . . wtf?! Zune related

[Jrecee]

From IGNs review of the Zune HD:

On the other hand, the Zune Marketplace is not without its allure. For roughly $15 a month, users can have unlimited access to all of the Zune Marketplace's extensive music collection, and can download as much as they want so long as they keep their Zune Pass. Unfortunately, the catch is that users only have permanent ownership of 10 personally selected songs a month and as soon as your Zune Pass expires, all of the other Zune Marketplace-downloaded tracks are rendered inoperable.

Seriously? What. . . the. . . . fuck? I'm not even sure where to start with this. Hell, maybe I'm completely lost and have misread what they're saying.

Opinions.

[Anayo]

Count me out! I'm not buying one of those.

Although, it does remind me of this article: http://www.paulgraham.com/publishing.html

[Reverend]

I'm happy with my Philips GoGear.

[dlmvii]

From IGNs review of the Zune HD:

On the other hand, the Zune Marketplace is not without its allure. For roughly $15 a month, users can have unlimited access to all of the Zune Marketplace's extensive music collection, and can download as much as they want so long as they keep their Zune Pass. Unfortunately, the catch is that users only have permanent ownership of 10 personally selected songs a month and as soon as your Zune Pass expires, all of the other Zune Marketplace-downloaded tracks are rendered inoperable.

Seriously? What. . . the. . . . fuck? I'm not even sure where to start with this. Hell, maybe I'm completely lost and have misread what they're saying.

Opinions.

This doesn't seem like a bad deal at all...For 15$ a month, you get to download 10 tracks to keep forever, even after your pass expires. So say $1.00 per song, and you spend $5 per month to download any music you want, for free. You only get this music while you are paying the monthly fee, once you do, you have to get rid of this. It would be totally ridiculous to think you could pay $15 once, download 1000s of tracks, and keep them forever. If you're willing to part with $15 a month, you get a large amount of music. This isn't really outrageous at all...

[Jrecee]

I guess if you look at it as renting it's different. Basically you're paying $15 to rent a bunch of music every month. I saw the $15 unlimited music thing advertised before though with the old zune, and I'm not sure if it had the same limitation. If it did it was being advertised without the fine print. Had I bought one and found out later I would have been pretty pissed off.

Still, I don't even like the idea that there's some sort of information embedded into all my music that allows them to kill it.

[RyaNtheSlayA]

It's actually a better deal than say iTunes where you buy and don't own your music. Here you buy and own $10 of music a month then pay $5 a month to rent as much music as you want!

[Mod_Man_Extreme]

Yeah, you've misread it completely.

The way that Zune pass works is that you pay a $15 subscription fee and it lets you download as many songs as you want from the Zune marketplace, but only lets you keep ten of those songs if you simply let the Zune pass expire. It's a subscription service with expiration dates just like any other rental style deal such as PSN or your local Blockbuster except you get to keep 10 of those songs for yourself given the event that you'd like to quit the Zune pass service.

Now you can simply just buy all of your songs off of the Zune marketplace at 99 cents a piece or $10 per album (or whatever the hell they charge (I've had my Zune for three years or so, but all I do is buy CD's for home and rip them to my Zune for travel and have never actually used the marketplace besides reading all of the details on it when I installed it forever ago.)) and those songs are yours to keep for forever on your Zune, or by burning them to a CD and re-ripping them to your PC (to remove the Zune only DRM).

It's the same basic principle as any other music download service, but they simply offer the Zune pass as an option for the 20 something with way too much money to burn and no concept of DRM or what's going to happen when that license expires if they don't renew it to keep them hooked on the Zune marketplace.

[Mod_Man_Extreme]

I guess if you look at it as renting it's different. Basically you're paying $15 to rent a bunch of music every month. I saw the $15 unlimited music thing advertised before though with the old zune, and I'm not sure if it had the same limitation. If it did it was being advertised without the fine print. Had I bought one and found out later I would have been pretty pissed off.

Still, I don't even like the idea that there's some sort of information embedded into all my music that allows them to kill it.

Actually Microsoft's always blared that "Keep ten songs!" at the end of all the commercials, it's just that now they're really pushing for it with the Zune HD to get a foothold in on Apple's turf for the X-Mas season.

Also it's always been like that through any DRM service, it's not actually your music when you buy an mp3 (unless you use a DRM free service such as eMusic or Napster) it's actually your license which does expire under certain conditions and can be removed if some big event happens.

[DCsegaDH]

Its better than my ipod, it freezes all the time