Call me crazy, but usually when people pay money for something, they like to own it. The good people at Microsoft, however, beg (kinda literally) to differ, as they clearly demonstrate in their recent “sharp guy who talks to you the camera in a conversational way” commercial (which is also being advertised right here on TMT):
Bypassing the fact that you only get to actually keep and own 10 of the songs that you download with your Zune subscription, the ad proceeds to claim that it costs $30,000 to fill the largest iPod with 99¢ songs from iTunes. Never mind the fact that, even at iTunes’ 99¢ per track, the “average” music fan probably doesn’t add more than 15 tracks a month to their collection. And double-never mind the fact that, at the same 10 songs per month rate, it’d take you (hang on, let me get my iPhone to calculate this) 250 years to buy this much music on iTunes. So hopefully you’ll still be into that new Ruben Studdard in 2259 A.D.
Even the market leader in music subscription services, Rhapsody, has managed to amass a mere 800,000 willing to pay the same $14.95 a month for its service. The young folks seem to prefer to own their music, and, you know, NOT get lectured by elderly Aryan “Financial Planners” about saving money on downloads that they typically yank off of LimeWire anyway. But even if the guy in the suit is a tool and the background music is inane and the math is fuzzy and skewed, Microsoft has one thing going for it: those Zunes that they show in the commercial sure are cool-looking... oh wait.
