Jeff Wallace

Big day for the Zune team! The team worked all day yesterday to release a new service update this morning. The Zune team did an outstanding job with some first run up sells and the many video features. I updated my PC and Zune device without any issues. I also took some time walking through the UI changes. I especially love the new ability to play music from cover art. I am looking forward to using the additional new features.

Congratulations to iLike! They launched their new store powered by MediaNet today streaming mp3 samples and selling mp3 downloads from our catalog. Amazing team from start to finish one of the fastest customer service launches I’ve seen. I’m really excited.

I get this question a lot from my friends. “What music service should I use?” Being a technology maven for your friends can be fun and a challenge. Being in the business I of course have my own personal favorites like Zune, iTunes, MP3Tunes, Rhapsody, Napster, Pandora and now deceased Yahoo Unlimited and MTVN. In reality there is a much larger list. There are also some really great band sites and of course the social networking sites like MySpace music.

PCMag has done a nice job. Music Service Reviews

While there has been some news on the end of Total Music see the TechCruch and PaidContent article.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/07/the-totalmusic-experiment-is-sinking-fast/

http://paidcontent.org/article/419-umg-and-sony-music-jv-total-music-shuts-down/

Below is the “Album of the Week” from TotalMusic’s owned site Tunepost.com.

A quick tear down of the widget. The whole widget is a flash .SWF it allows you to play, pause, stop and shuffle. It is playing back full-length AAC+ streaming audio using Adobe Flash Media Servers delivered over Akamai’s CDN. While listening to the Album-of-the-Week I experienced one ad that come up inside the widget. After reviewing the PlayerConfig.xml it would appear they also considered a version of the player doesn’t include Ads if a special API key is included. No doubt the Ads are how Tunepost plans on monetizing the streams. Apparently Total Music or Tunepost.com doesn’t do commerce yet or now may never. In the current widget/player the widget buy button sends you off to the Amazon store to purchase the MP3. Unfortunately the buy button only sends you to the current song so you can’t purchase the album. They include a link to merchandise that isn’t implemented yet and a link to dada.net to purchase a ringtone. It is also not really implemented as it sends you to the dada.net site signup. Don’t bother with the Sign-up/Register button on the bottom. The Tunepost.com site is still in private beta so you won’t be able to do much more.