Zune Thoughts: Misconceptions About Zune WiFi Sharing: Random versus Purposeful

Can you tell your friends about new music and bands in other ways? Sure - email, IM, SMS, whatever. But when you send over an actual song, there's something visceral about it - something tangible. When you know that you have the song on your device, you're more likely to listen to it, rather than having to track down the 30 second samples of a band's music online somewhere. Granted, I still think the song sharing DRM is too harsh: three plays is fine, but three days? Not every Zune owner uses their Zune every day - at least once I've had music shared with me that has timed out before I've even listened to it once. I can't fathom why there's a three day limit - why not seven days? Or 30 days? The real limit should be the number of listens, not the time it's been sitting on the Zune. I hope the Zune team can re-negotiate that limit at some point.

But back to the original premise: if the Zune team really wants to enable the "random Zune song sharing" scenarios, they'd have to make a few changes. First, WiFi should be active even when the Zune is in sleep mode (which would cause a battery problem). Next, they'd have to create some sort of interrupt to tell the user that someone wants to share music with them - a gentle ping in a song, or an actual pausing of the song perhaps (that's fraught with user experience problems though of course). They'd also have to increase the power on the WiFi, boosting range to 100 feet or more. And they might even allow a person to set up their Zune for automatic sharing: sending a particular song, album or playlist with any Zune in range, automatically. Automatic receiving of songs could also be added (as a user option of course) - it might be neat to look at your Zune when you get to work and find that it had received five new songs. And maybe there would be an opt-in way for you to get in touch with the person who sent you that song.

There are lots of interesting ways to enable song sharing with random Zunes, but none of them are in place today: and as such, I believe it's an error to look at WiFi sharing on the Zune and think it's designed for sharing music with random people. The Zune is all about "the social" and that means sharing tunes with your pals - which is just fine with me.