Why I didn’t renew my Zune Pass
Signed up for a 14-day free trial of Zune Pass but won’t renew. Here’s why:
- Tried to buy an album (730 MS Points) — half of the 10 songs downloaded and the rest refused to download. I had to spend half an hour on the phone to resolve the issue. The album still isn’t purchasable and they advised me to avoid trying again, calling the album “bugged.” To their credit, phone support was top notch and also surprisingly nice. But ecommerce needs to work Amazon flawlessly for me to want to continue to engage in it. Also, it’s annoying to use MS Points instead of standard dollars. I know why they’re used (having worked at Microsoft), but I feel that Microsoft has way underinvested in improving the MS Points architecture, infrastructure, reliability and consumer-facing features. It’s old and increasingly a weak point for products that use it.
- The catalog is infested with DRM’ed music. I should be able to change a preference so that no DRM content is ever shown to me. I won’t buy it and don’t want to be shown it. Of the “millions” of songs in the catalog, it felt like half were DRM.
- The Zune recommendation engine is broken. Pandora does it well. Zune doesn’t. I just clicked on Zune’s “songs for you” and they recommended Justin Timberlake. Are you frigging kidding me? I’ve played 2,673 songs through on Zune at this point and you push JT on me? Are you trying to make me retch on my keyboard? The software should have a *very* good idea of my tastes. Pandora nails this. If only Pandora’s Music Genome technology were part of Zune! So, in order to find good new music, I had to run Pandora for the recommendations, then I had to punch in Pandora’s recommendations to see if Zune had the music (it often didn’t, or when it did, it was often crippled with DRM).
- Unavailable content. I couldn’t find ANY content from (just to name a few) Man Plus, Truckasaurus. I also couldn’t find some very important content from Ratatat. Of Ratatat’s available content, much was available only through a whole album purchase. This is not a great consumer experience, but I realize it’s a business and licensing issue. The music industry makes it far easier for me to pirate. Here I am, a paying consumer, looking to buy music that I like and it’s EASIER for me to find it outside of a legit content service like Zune.
- Favorites list is crippled. This one I blame the Zune team for. In my first couple of days with the Zune pass, I’m blithely listening to music and tagging certain content as “favorite” thinking I’ll be able to go back to these favorites at any time (as I might a “favorite” within a browser). I even imagined that I’d be able to assemble a playlist out of my favorites. Instead, the “favorites” is just 8 songs long. This was probably done so that server-side storage per account was kept reasonably low (a cost savings) and maybe even because licensing restrictions made long favorites lists problematic. But this is broken. Avid music listeners certainly have more than 8 favorite songs — we might have dozens or hundreds, depending on the mood that we’re in.
I could go on, but these are the most egregious issues that prevented me from renewing my Zunepass subscription. It’s too bad. I want to see something like this succeed.