Inside Home Recording.com

Could you get commissions from songs on your Zune?

November 29th, 2006 by Derek

At the Music Tech Summit that I recorded in Seattle earlier this month, Microsoft’s J Allard discussed numerous possible future features that his company’s Zune media player, software, and store could eventually have, especially for musicians. (That’s opposed to the current Zune features, which have led to almost universally poor reviews to date.)

One of those, which Allard didn’t particularly emphasize, and which had been rumoured before, was the possible future ability for Zune users to receive a commission to sales of songs they recommend to other Zune users via the device’s Wi-Fi sharing. Over at Good Morning Silicon Valley, columnist John Paczkowski notes that Microsoft has applied for a patent on such a system.

Presumably, if that ever came to pass, it would only work for songs in the Zune Marketplace, so for your own music you’d need to find a way to get it in there through a service such as CD Baby or IODA.

Now, Allard has all sorts of cool ideas for the Zune, and for indie musicians working with it, but so far none of them have come to pass—it’s essentially a larger, heavier iPod-style device with Wi-Fi that doesn’t do much, unimpressive battery life, and flaky desktop software. It doesn’t record, nor does it support podcasts directly, nor does it even easily work as a portable hard drive.

But Microsoft is also prone to grinding away at projects it wants to until it gets things more or less right, so we’ll see.

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