I want to start this blog on a positive note. If not for the Zune team, Microsoft would probably have no chance in the mobile phone market. The Zune team is awesome, they are very talented, and they have done some amazing things to transform a strategically important part of Microsoft.
I removed my rose colored glasses to write the rest of this blog though, it wasn't easy, because I was once an evangelist of the service.
Imagine if you were renting a house, payments up to date, and one day you went to work and when you returned you found the locks were changed.
I want to start by saying that I like the idea of subscription music when it's executed well. I do not believe or support piracy. I also don't like when someone "steals" something from me that I'm paying them for.
This is a serious blog about Zune and subscription music.
Have you ever been in a situation where you get so used to doing something that you don't pay attention to what's going on around you? A situation where once you realize what happened you wonder why you didn’t figure it out earlier?
I admit it. Since the beginning I was a very vocal Zune evangelist. I’ve written many blogs on why subscription music and Zune makes sense. I even overlooked the PlayForSure vs Zune DRM confusion. I love the business model, I love all you can eat subscription music, and the new Zune HD is pretty sweet. ..but I've been blinded by my own enthusiasm, and I finally had a wake up call a couple of weeks ago.
It started when two of my Zune’s died, and I was going to replace them immediately. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it) I didn’t have time to pick up replacements and I ended up back in Calgary.
So now I’m in Calgary, I blew the dust off of an old Zune 30 Gig and reformatted it. I then started going through my music collection and was dragging and dropping a few selections over.
In the past I ignored the music that wouldn't copy over for whatever reason (those of you who own Zune's know exactly what I'm talking about), but this time I wanted to find out what was going on. My media storage was nearly full and I was ready to go out and buy a few more hard drives... but then it struck me.
Why do I need this much storage? What's going on?
Why does some music work and some doesn’t? Why does music that I downloaded and listened to many times in the past not work anymore? Why is it that sometimes the music that I rented is no longer working and no longer available in the catalog? ..and more importantly, why do I have to be an expert to dig through and find these errors?
You think my wife would ever figure any of this out?
So then I started digging into the file history and I was shocked to see duplicate directories, files stored in a “subscription” directory and the same non-working music stored in the “Zune” directory. Then on top of that I went through some of these directories and noticed multiple duplicates of the same song. Why is that? Because every time a license changes and you go to listen to it and it doesn’t work you do the natural thing and try to re-download it.
10 Free Song Credits (not what you think)
To make matters worse, Zune offers something called “song credits” where you get 10 free songs every month (so if you cancel your subscription you can still listen to them). I’ve been downloading “The Complete Led Zeppelin” 10 songs at a time for months. I just found out that half of my collection is stuck with DRM and the other half is are MP3’s. How frustrating is that? I thought I "paid" for this music! It’s so annoying I can’t even begin to explain it.
Zune, the good and the bad
What Zune doesn’t do well is manage their licenses, audio, files, or behind the scenes user experience well.
What Zune does do well is offer a great experience of music exploration in a nicely designed software environment. The pricing is very reasonable, the 10 song bonus is a bonus if you use it right.
The good is far outweighed by the bad, however. The graveyard of dead files and junk that I found throughout my media storage system is shocking. I am beyond disappointed. If I wasn't an expert I couldn't imagine how I would deal with this.
Fixing the damage
So what is the solution? If you are in the same boat as I am you are probably wondering where to start. Well, if you bought any of their songs with “credits” I suggest you convert them over to MP3 using the latest version of Tunebite. It’s a long painstaking task, but it’s worth it. Once you convert an artist over you can delete the original Zune files and keep going until you’re done.
You’ll be surprised how much space you end up saving, and you can finally listen to your music on other devices besides this hopelessly crutched ecosystem. The next thing I would recommend is Amazon Mp3. Their music is DRM free and very inexpensive. If you're looking for an alternative to DRM hell then that would be the best choice, for now.
DRM sucks if you don't focus on your customer
Sorry Microsoft, you know I love Windows 7, and I was once a huge vocal evangelist of Zune.. I was even a big advocate of Microsoft getting the Zune team to design their phone software too....but the reality is you changed the locks on my music and essentially took the content that I’m renting from you without telling me! Is that legal? In the future I would trust you will introduce a proactive and clean way of helping to manage customers content.
Now perhaps it's not only Microsoft that has this problem, it's likely more a DRM issue than anything....but If you choose to support DRM you should focus on your customers first.
I welcome any comments or questions on this blog.
