Arsehole
Apropos of Microsoft’s WTF?! deal to pay a privately levied tax to Universal on every Zune sold here’s what UMG’s chairman/CEO/arsehole in chief Doug Morris had to say:
“These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it, so it’s time to get paid for it.”
That really makes me regret all the legally purchased Universal music on mine. Am I unusually perverse that now I do want to steal from them? After all it won’t make them think any worse of me than they already do. Surely it can’t be too much longer before there’s critical mass of people who are sick of lining the pockets of people who treat them like criminals?
Link via BoingBoing.
2006/11/15 Update: Josh Smith links to several lists of Universal artists so you know who to avoid in future.
November 13th, 2006 at 6:18 pm
The Zune’s appears to be almost entirely (use|point)less, you can’t DL podcasts to it, no music from other sources, no downloading via wifi, stupid 6(?) play / 6(?) day rule on shared tracks, maybe it’ll be better in a year’s time when MS realise they’ve got to think about the product a little more than they obviously have and just get a grip on reality and the way in which people WANT to use these deviced and not dictate how they think people SHOULD be using them.
Unfortunalty I can see a lot of people buying a Zune as a gift or whatever and then finding out that they’ve been mugged.
Shame really, Apple could have done with some proper competition.
November 13th, 2006 at 9:19 pm
It’s proper silly. If I buy a Zune, I’ve already given Universal some money. Does that mean I can steal one of their albums with a clear conscience?
November 13th, 2006 at 9:25 pm
Oh, and it’s a 3 day / 3 play rule on wifi-shared tracks (whichever comes first). Playing just a few seconds of the track counts as one play, and you can’t share the same track with the same zune more than once. It counts for all music - not just DRMd stuff. Speaking of which, it still doesn’t play MS’ own PlaysForSure stuff.
Oh, and the Wifi can only connect to other zunes - you can’t copy music to it by wifi for instance. It doesn’t work as an external hard drive either.
Thing is, all MS stuff is like this with Version 1. Give them a few revisions and they’ll get it very right indeed. Then give them a few more and it’ll start to get big, bloated and slow ;o)
November 14th, 2006 at 9:17 am
MS seem to have forgotten all the other stuff the iPod does too in version 1.
“The Zune 1.0 player is pretty barren, too. It doesn’t have a single standard iPod amenity: no games, alarm clock, stopwatch, world clock, password-protected volume limiter, equalizer, calendar, address book or notes module.”
from NYTimes review
Kind of weird for Apple to be the feature bloat poster boy.
November 14th, 2006 at 12:20 pm
Hmmm 1.0 strikes…
Installing the Zune sucked
November 14th, 2006 at 1:46 pm
I wonder how much any of this crapness will actually effect sales? What are the comics that regular people read saying about it?
November 14th, 2006 at 3:34 pm
The outrageously awful Connect and SonicStage didn’t stop the Walkman flying out of the shops…
/not bitter.