We had some difficulties evaluating the Zune Marketplace. Since our first review the Zune Marketplace has make some significant improvements and has even seen a design face lift. However, in the end we were still a bit disappointed with the Zune Marketplace; the only music store with specific device compatibility to even hold a candle to iTunes and iPod. But in the end it still felt like Zune was just trying to “keep up with the Apples.”
The three considerable features keeping Zune Marketplace out of our award winning spots is simply MP3 music selection, DRM tracks and the media player download.
Unlike most music download stores of Zune’s size and influence they have made little headway in the MP3/DRM-free market. Although they have some DRM-free music (about 1 million tracks) and they are more expensive than protected music.
Zune Marketplace has about five million songs in its library and its selection is comparable to our top services. We were able to find almost all of Billboard’s top 100 in the Marketplace store. The Zune’s Marketplace is a little weaker in the independent market than say iTunes or AmazonMP3.
Most songs in the Zune library are available in protected WMA or ZPL format. However, there are different protections on Zune WMA files than there are on Rhapsody or other PlaysForSure music downloads. This means tracks downloaded from the Zune Marketplace are only compatible with Zune players, unless your purchased track explicitly indicated it was an MP3 song.
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