…coming right at you. Okay…sorry…but watching this guy’s review of the new Microsoft Zune music player has made me a tad giddy…

Regards that Universal Music “Pirate Tax” as Nate calls it. Actually, the bad precedent was set back in the days of the compact cassette. The music industry pitched a fit in the 1970s about people taping music off the radio, and off of other people’s LPs with cassette recorders. In the 1980s the same sort of deal was struck regarding blank cassette tapes, and ever since then the price of a blank tape has included in it a “pirate tax”. Later, the Digital Audio Tape formate (DAT) died before it could get off the ground due to RIAA bellyaching about it’s potential for making clean copies from CDs. Even after they got a “serial copy management system,” included on every DAT recorder exported to the U.S., the RIAA bitched for royalties on each and every DAT machine and tape sold. So the precedent for Microsoft’s deal with Universal is, alas, already there. But Nate (who did the YouTube above) lives in Austrialia, where the situation may be different.

Bear in mind, that the first version of Microsoft Windows was an unmitigated piece of junk. By version 3.1 they were raking in the market share. On the other hand, Windows was able to monopolize the desktop market in a number of ways that I don’t see them being able to pull off in the consumer music player market. Sure, they own Windows, and Windows still has something like 90 percent of the desktop market. But music isn’t software. I know it’s techie to think of it that way, and in a sense you can think of it that way. But it’s not software. It’s content. Output, if you like.

Microsoft might be able to lock-in buyers to its own proprietary DRM formats, as Apple does, but the content itself is independent of all that. Even making exclusive deals with the record labels won’t lock people in. If the RIAA lawsuits have proven anything, it’s that locking music up doesn’t work. What Apple’s been proving for the past couple years is that if you make using digital music easy, convenient, and inexpensive, and the DRM unobtrusive, people will support it. Steve Jobs has said that piracy is a behavior issue, not a software issue, and I think Apple has struck the right balance by only making it hard to pirate iTunes music, not trying to make it impossible. Because then you end up locking everything down so tight you’re just pissing off your customers too.

But Microsoft’s business model has always been about locking users in. Extend And Embrace… That’s what that “Zune Points” crap is about. Not so much making the music look less expensive then it is, but locking you in. Microsoft doesn’t know any other way of doing business. That’s why they’ve never been successful outside of their core software business. So I don’t think they’re going to get very far here either.