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Zune Marketplace Downloads Review
Zune Marketplace offers two types of service:
- Zune Pass - for $14.99 per month download and play as much music as you want and sync it with up to three Zune portable devices
- Zune MarketPlace - download DRM free music and video paid for on a per download basis. Downloads are paid for with Microsoft Points which work out roughly as:
- Individual Song - $0.99 (79 points)
- Full Album - (mostly) $10.78 (880 points)
- Videos - usually $1.99 per TV show, but vary depending on content
- Integrated social netowrking profile
- Autoplaylist feature creates playlists based on what you like
- Gapless playback of tunes
- Integrated with Windows Messenger
- Only compatible with Windows
- Download as many songs as you want for the duration of your subscription with a Zune Pass
- Sync to three different players with a Zune Pass
- Buy songs with Microsoft points and download them up to five times
- Bought songs can be copied to unlimited number of portable devices
- Bought songs can be burned to up to 7 CDs
- Free Zune software to play and organise your music
- Subscribe to free podcasts and automatically download them
- Integrates well with Zune portable player
- Wirelessly beam tunes to other Zune portable devices
- Share playlists with your friends
- Automatically see what your friends have been listening to
Zune Marketplace is the online music service offering from Microsoft. As such it integrates fantastically with any other Microsoft product, but anyone using anything different might want to think twice. The service it provides is pretty good, especially if you own a Zune portable player, but its complex pricing and compatibility issues let it down.
ZuneMarketplace is really geared towards owners of the Zune portable player. It offers an all-you-can-eat subscription service which provides lots of great features but will only work with Zune players. This lets you download all the (DRM protected) songs you want and sync them with up to three different players. One of the best things about it is that you can send tunes wirelessly between players, which will allow the receiver to listen to the track three times before having to purchase it themselves. The selection of music available is not quite as wide as some services, but you will be likely to find most of the new releases as soon as they are available.
To properly take advantage of the Zune subscription service you will need to download the Zune software. It's only compatible with Windows, of course, but once installed is actually a very easy to use application. It organizes all of your downloads for you and automatically syncs up your tunes when a player is connected - all from the comfort of a flashy, all singing, all dancing user interface.
The software and website both integrate with a heap of social networking features which allow you to see what your friends have been listening to, share playlists and send them tracks (with the subscription service). Furthermore you can link up Windows Live Messenger to show what you're listening to at any given time - not so good if you've got some embarrassing 80s glam rock in your music library! These are all very useful and fun if you're into that sort of thing, but we would prefer a less busy interface for downloading songs.
Regarding Digital Rights Management (DRM):
all the tracks you download through the subscription service are DRM protected tracks that will only work with the Zune software and Zune portable players - anyone else can forget about it. You can sync with up to three portable players and can download from up to three different computers with this service.
You can also download DRM free tracks from Zune Marketplace. These are MP3 files encoded at 192 kbps. The terms and conditions state you can copy these to an unlimited number of portable devices, but only burn to seven CDs. It's not clear whether this is actually enforced through any mechanism or whether it's just the license you are agreeing to. Either way it's not as "DRM free" as most services, which will allow you to burn to an unlimited number of CDs.
So what about value for money? Well,
Microsoft have gone insane with the pricing structure for their Zune Marketplace. The subscription service is easy; it's $14.99 per month for all you can download, with the ability to copy to up to three portable Zune players. It's the DRM free downloads where the trouble begins. First up, you can only buy the tunes if you have a Windows Live account. These are free though, and anyone with a hotmail account is half way there. However, you can only buy tunes with Microsoft points which must be purchased in blocks of set amounts as follows:
- $5 = 400 points
- $15 = 1200 points
- $25 = 2000 points
- $50 = 4000 points
So, as you can see the points don't match up very easily to real U.S dollars. As far as we can work out an individual song costs 79 points which works out as around about $0.99. Albums vary a lot in price, depending on how many songs are on the album, but generally are about 880 points, or $10.78. If we were cynical we might point out that neither 79 nor 880 divide exactly into any of the block amounts of points available so you are always paying for points you don't need.but of course we're not cynical.
It seems Microsoft either get things dead right or dead wrong. In this case we think the latter. There seems to be neither rhyme nor reason to the crazy pricing plan, and the amount and quality of DRM free tunes doesn't compare to other services in our top ten. The one thing that keeps the Zune Marketplace in a good position in our list is that it offers a lot of useful features if you have a Zune portable player. Otherwise we would recommend a different service.
Click the button below to check out Zune Marketplace Downloads at Zune.net for yourself...
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