Zune Marketplace Reviewer's Comments

We had a hard time evaluating Zune Marketplace. We thought that the only competitor to hold a candle to iPod would come out of the gate with some really great stuff. Sadly, we were disappointed. We felt that the Zune Marketplace was just trying to “keep up with the Apples” and fell flat.

Zune Marketplace offers almost three million songs, and their selection is comparable to our top services. Microsoft claims they are in negotiations to offer DRM free music in the future, but for now the only formats offered in the marketplace is its own ZPL file. However, the Zune players can also play MP3. Unfortunately, these devices won’t even play WMA, a media file invented by Windows, and a file used by most of the other music download sites featured in this review.  

To play or browse music you have to download the integrated music player. We thought the player was great and easy to use; that is once it finally installed. At first it had difficulty recognizing our operating system, then it took much longer than necessary to install, it forced us to modify the registry on our computers and then we had to answer 20 questions including birthdays and phone numbers just to create a free account.

By the time this was all done, we thought we could finally start listening to some music. We were wrong. Like some of our top services, Zune highly encourages you to subscribe, allowing you to download as many titles you’d like as long as your subscription is active. But if you cancel, those titles expire. You can by songs without signing up for a subscription, but you have to buy “points” first. You can’t just get one song using your credit card. You have to buy a set lot of points, the lowest starting with 400 points for $5. These points can be use in the Zune Marketplace or in the Xbox 360 Marketplace. 400 points will get you approximately five songs.

In the end, we were just plain exhausted trying to figure out how this service worked. Apple has an 80 percent market share in MP3 player sales; they can afford to shut their music store off from the other 20 percent of portable device holders. Microsoft needs to get their act together and get friendly with the other music download services and MP3 manufacturers if they want to make a dent in this industry.