Microsoft: More Zunes coming in 2009

Remember that teenage trick of sticking your fingers in your ears and saying, "I can't hear you"? That's how I felt on Thursday morning when I talked to Adam Sohn, the marketing director for Zune.

I don't mean that Microsoft is oblivious to reality: Sohn admitted that the latest Zune sales figures were bad (though apparently in line with Microsoft's very low expectations) and that the company would prefer to be selling millions of the things instead of having them pile up in warehouses. It's more like Microsoft doesn't care what the … Read more

Follow your muse, Microsoft--get out of hardware

About a year ago, I blogged about a study conducted by Yahoo researcher Duncan Watts showing that there's almost no link between quality and popularity in music.

In that study, if subjects could see how other subjects were voting on a particular song, they tended to vote the same way. Each song's popularity had almost no correlation with "objective" quality, as measured by a control group who voted based on ears alone.

Music industry blogger Bob Lefsetz took this point a bit further the other day in a post advising young musicians that they shouldn't … Read more

Palm Pre: Where's the music?

Palm's Pre won CNET's Best of CES award for 2009, and is getting tons of love from around the tech world.

Not a bad accomplishment for a smartphone with a completely new operating system, from a company written off as dead not long ago.

I wrote something like this about RIM's BlackBerry Storm and got some heat for it, but still...where's the music?

I don't mean that the Pre won't play music--of course it will. Palm even announced a deal with Amazon.com to let users buy music downloads without any intervention (cooperation? … Read more

Microsoft's Bach: We'd do Zune differently

I tuned into Thursday's conversation between Microsoft's Robbie Bach and financial analysts at CES. Bach is the president of the company's Entertainment and Devices division, which includes Xbox, Windows Mobile, retail channel relationships, and most of the other fun stuff. It also includes the Zune, which, given its lack of financial impact on the company, didn't merit much of his time.

Toward the end however, one analyst (not identified on the recording) suggested that the company's foray into MP3 players had been a waste of time. Today, Microsoft talks about providing software and services on &… Read more

We'll wait for Barcelona for Zune, mobile news

Bill Gates skipped the Consumer Electronics Show this year, leaving the coveted opening-night keynote spot to CEO Steve Ballmer.

While Ballmer's always an engaging and funny speaker, the company didn't have much to say: a couple long-rumored deals for Live Search, some Windows 7 features that have already been shown at the Professional Developers' Conference and reviewed all over the Web (the beta will be publicly available by the end of the week), and Kodu, a Microsoft Research project moved to the Xbox 360 (pretty cool, but it's been around for a couple years).

But no Zune for Windows Mobile. … Read more

DRM deathwatch: iTunes, the final chapter

CNET News' Greg Sandoval is already covering the story, so I won't belabor it, but kudos to Apple and the three holdout record labels--Sony, Universal, and Warner--for reaching an agreement that will result in more than 8 million songs being available on iTunes with no digital rights management (DRM) restrictions. (EMI has made DRM-free songs available on iTunes since last spring, but only 10 percent of the music sold in the U.S. comes from EMI.) As Greg reports, Apple will also let users with existing DRM-encrusted downloads upgrade to a DRM-free version at a higher bitrate--256kbps--for an extra … Read more

I woke up this morning, and my Zune was gone

Update: Microsoft has just posted an official explanation for the problem--it's related to a clock driver that doesn't handle leap years properly. So apparently, the Zune 30 is date-aware. The fix: wait for January 1, let your battery run down, charge it up again, and turn it on. I'd suggest giving that a try before trying to pry the case open to unplug and replug the battery.

Reports are coming in from all over the Internet that 30GB Zunes--the original model, which Microsoft shipped in 2006 and 2007--are all freezing up at once.

I have one of … Read more

Music tech predictions for 2009

As I said in my 2008 sum-up, people tend to overestimate the amount of change that will happen in one year--which means my best bet for 2009 would be to simply reiterate my almost-there predictions from 2008, like the death of DRM and the decline of the concert industry.

But that would be boring. Thus, behold my all-new-and-improved predictions for music and technology in 2009:

Zune phone--sort of. 2009 will finally be the year that Microsoft takes the wraps off its mobile-entertainment strategy, and the Zune brand will be prominently featured. Perhaps as early as next week at CES, Microsoft … Read more

How'd I do on 2008 predictions?

Update, 1/6/09: Today during the MacWorld keynote, Apple announced that it would offer the vast majority of songs for sale on iTunes without DRM restrictions, and would begin making iTunes downloads available over 3G cellular networks as well as Wi-Fi connections. Six days--I'll take a mulligan, raising my batting average to .350.

Not so great.

Predictions columns are always risky because it's easy to look back a year later and see how wrong you were. For the most part, I was on the right track, but too bold--as a wise prognosticator once said, we tend to … Read more