Zune Social

» see social.zune.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

in 2007 i was on ttnet broadband in ankara with a first-generation ipod nano. the zune had not crossed the atlantic to me and it never would. microsoft launched zune social that november as the community layer on top of a device sold only in the united states and canada. the pitch was 'welcome to the social'. the design was that every zune had a card, a public profile page showing recently played tracks and top artists, and that other zunes near you could receive a song over wifi and play it three times over three days before it locked. this was the 2007 vision of walking around and squirting music at strangers on a bus.

the problem was that this only worked if the strangers on the bus also owned zunes. they did not. zune sold roughly four million units total in six years against the ipod's hundreds of millions. in turkey there was no official zune sales channel at all, so the social feature had a domestic user base of zero. this is what happens when you ship a network-effect product without the network.

i knew about zune social from tech-blog posts and the occasional ars technica review. by 2007 my music was already ipod plus itunes with an mp3 folder built out of cd rips and old file-sharing years. buying a portable player from turkey that only worked in a us store and only shared music with other us-store players never came up for me and never came up for anyone else in ankara.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it did ~

zune social had a specific texture that was not quite last.fm and not quite myspace music. every user had a card at social.zune.net that showed the top artists of the week, the badges earned, and the friends list. the badges pulled listening data into achievements. one badge tracked consistency, another tracked genre range, others tracked specific artists or labels. the wifi song squirt was the piece that got the press attention, but the actual daily engagement was the card page and the friends feed of what other people were listening to.

last.fm had already been scrobbling since 2002 and was cross-platform. zune social required you to own a zune. the platform lock was the whole story. the community was walled to a hardware base that microsoft could not sell.

~ the actual end ~

microsoft stopped releasing new zune hardware in october 2011. the zune hd from september 2009 was the last device. the software and services kept running for another year under the same brand. on 15 october 2012 microsoft killed the zune brand outright. zune.net redirected to the xbox music landing page, the marketplace became xbox music, and the social layer got quietly folded into the new service. the switch happened at 12:01 am eastern time on 16 october by microsoft's clock. zune pass subscribers got a 1,000 microsoft points parting gift.

xbox music kept some of the profile scaffolding for a while and dropped most of it. by 2015 xbox music had been rebranded to groove music. the last zune online services (device authentication and marketplace metadata for older devices) went offline on 15 november 2015. the zune card as a concept was gone by 2013 in practice.

~ the long tail ~

the wifi song squirt lives on as the ur-example of the wrong-place-wrong-time feature: real engineering work, poured into a platform without the users to make it useful. spotify and apple music arrived without any peer-to-peer story and won on catalog and streaming. the concept of a public listening card came back with spotify wrapped a decade later, without the sharing radios but with the same public profile shape. zune social lived in the same tab as friendster and myspace-era social pages, patient and deeply invested in a network that never showed up.

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