blech:
posted on 2006/07/26 15:34
Firstly, this is pretty much spurred by John Gruber's excellent 8-Ball answers piece on Microsoft's rumoured new portable media player.
He points out that the spec list combined with the ship date are, well, optimistic.
It's not something I'd thought about, but I think he's right. Wireless, a decent price, and all out by November? You can have good, cheap or fast. Pick two. Or maybe even just one.
Anyway, after seeing that, I ran across a relatively old (a whole two wweks!) piece from Daniel Jakult about the rumoured "we'll even replace your iTMS tunes!" part of the Zune deal.
The final commenter, Mithras, points out something interesting, and which should have been obvious:
When I first heard about the “free replacement tunes” thing, I assumed that it would be in conjunction with a subscription service — i.e., it scans your iTunes library and downloads “Janus” time-limited DRM’d Windows Media versions of the songs you’ve purchased.
That makes complete sense: if you're on a subscription service anyway (which I'm pretty sure would have to be part of the Zune concept) then it doesn't hurt to seed the collection with things the user owns but can't access.
It's also not going to cost Microsoft anything: if they subscription lapses, the music vanishes.
There's a handy side effect of reducing the incentives for trying to game the system to get free music.
[ 0 days, 16 hours later ]
I've been told that providing a song on a subscription also incurs a fee to the record company.
I'd be surprised if it was as large as the charge for an outright download, though, so my point should still stand. I hope.
We hate you all. Yes, especially you. Sod off and DIE