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Microsoft Considering Subsidizing Zune Sales

Posted by Zonk on from the nothing-else-has-worked-why-not dept.

grouchomarxist writes "Microsoft is considering selling the Zune subsidized like a cellphone, according to an excerpt on MarketWatch from a PC World magazine interview with Microsoft's Zune marketing director, Jason Reindorp. According to the article: 'The spokesman said that Microsoft first considered the cellphone-like distribution plan after seeing interest in its Zune Pass subscription service, which offers monthly paid access to songs on the Zune Marketplace, a competitor to Apple's iTunes store. Though he declined to say how many subscribers currently use Zune Pass, the spokesman said subscriptions rose 65% during January.'"

5 of 141 comments (clear)

  1. So... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny
    "the spokesman said subscriptions rose 65% during January."

    So... that's 165 people?

    1. Re:So... by encoderer · · Score: 5, Insightful

      1. Music subscription services are pretty popular. Perhaps you don't like it, but I've turned many people on to it and I've gotten a lot of positive feedback from friends and family. You're not paying for music thats stops playing when you stop paying. You're paying to listen to HUGE, GIGANTIC libraries of ANY SONG YOU WANT, whenever you want, wherever you want.

      Your comment like saying "Nobody would PAY for Cable Television. It makes no sense. Few people are willing to shell out money for television that stops playing when they stop paying"

      2. Your comment about iTMS having TV & movies is funny. Are you actually suggesting that a subscription model wouldn't work well for TV shows? I mean, what makes you think that MSFT couldn't offer TV as part of their subscription price in the future? When iTMS launched they didn't have TV in the beginning, either. You do realize that people have been buying into the subscription-model for TV for, oh, 30 years now?

      3. I love my iPod and I love iTMS. But as soon as I realized that I couldn't burn my TV purchases and that there was no "PlayFair" for video DRM I refused to give them another cent. Their video DRM is hideous and unacceptable. Imagine if FairPlay refused to let you burn them to CD. Well, THATS the kind of service you're paying for. $2 for 22 minutes of video that is crippled beyond all usefulness.

    2. Re:So... by R3d+M3rcury · · Score: 5, Interesting

      You're paying to listen to HUGE, GIGANTIC libraries of ANY SONG YOU WANT, whenever you want, wherever you want. Agreed. And one of the biggest mistakes is that it hasn't been marketed that way.

      Subscription services are trying to compete with stores. Stores basically say, "Come here and buy your favorite music." That's great. I want to buy my favorite music. But how do I know if I like a song?

      So how do you sell a subscription service? To me, the answer is the second part of the name: Service

      Suppose I pay $15 per month to have access to any songs I want. But what songs do I want? I'm not going to go through a catalog of 2 or 3 million songs and figure out what's good and what sucks! I have better things to do with my day! And I already own my favorite songs on CD, so I'm certainly not going to rent them again. So what do I get from the subscription model? Absolutely nothing. I still have to do all the work.

      So make it a real service. Do some research. Use other people's research. Come up with genre playlists and let people subscribe to them. Find worthwhile podcasts and hire/pay people to make them daily/weekly and let people subscribe to them. Promote hot DJs at hot clubs by letting them come up with weekly playlists and let people subscribe to them. Build playlists from Billboard, Radio & Records, etc. and let people subscribe to them. And, of course, let "regular people" build lists of music and let people subscribe to them. Heck, build playlists based upon my ripped CDs and let me subscribe to them.

      Then let me build my own playlists of music and playlists. I might want to build a playlist of Billboard's Top 40 along with this song from your collection, this song from my CD, and Club DJ Wugmeister's mix. I might build another playlist of Radio & Record's Adult Contemporary listings, along with my Barry Manilow collection (from CD), the latest ABC News podcast, and WJAZ's Smooth Jazz playlist.

      The "Here's our whole catalog--you figure it out" model isn't bringing them in droves because it's too much work. I'm not going to pay $15 per month for access to a mind-numbingly large collection of music. But I might pay that much if the subscription service actually provides a service where I automatically get new music that I might actually want to listen to!
  2. Zune Meme Prediction (From October) by broward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    As predicted in October, 2006, based on keyword rate-of-change, Zune is a flop.

    http://www.realmeme.com/roller/page/realmeme/?entr y=zune_meme_rerun

    I believe the Microsoft attempted a viral marketing / meme manipulation scheme over the Internet, but I can't prove it. It's getting harder and harder to "advertise", partly because of the flood of information from the IT age, partly due to increasing resistence to memetic propagation.

    http://www.realmeme.com/roller/page/realmeme/?entr y=zune_meme_successful_prediction_so

  3. Worked great for the XBox by ObligatoryUserName · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Subsidising the cost of hardware in the hopes of making up the money on content has worked wonders for the profits of the XBox division...

    I know, this is a different business model, but it looks like J Allard just trying to do what's "worked" in the past.